Do All Kids Deserve Equal Respect?

Parents-particularly dads—can you imagine your phone lighting up in the night with a frantic call from your worried and confused 11-year-old daughter, while she’s thousands of miles away on a school-sponsored trip? All parents fear middle of the night calls.

According to a legal demand letter sent to Colorado’s Jefferson County Public Schools administration and school board on Monday, December 4th, a similar distress call was recently experienced by a local child and her parents. The demand letter states, “In the summer of 2023, on a cross-county overnight trip, Jefferson Public Schools (JCPS) assigned a fifth-grade girl to sleep in the same bed with a fifth-grade boy who identifies as transgender without notifying the girl or her parents.” Alliance for Defending Freedom, the law firm which sent the letter accused the district of having a policy which violates the rights of parents and eliminates student privacy. A response from JCPS is expected by December 18th, presumably leaving JCPS officials and their team of lawyers scrambling at a time they’d rather be eating Christmas cookies and packing for their tropical winter vacations.

This legal fiasco in Jefferson County made us wonder if local students, families, and districts would be vulnerable to the same legal conflict.

Could This Happen Here?

In short, yes, the Jefferson County family's experience could happen in our local Northern Colorado districts to your children, grandchildren, or any of their friends. After a review of the Overnight Activities policies from JCPS and two local districts-Thompson School District in Loveland and Poudre School District in Fort Collins, we discovered the policies from the three districts are amazingly almost word-for-word identical to the JCPS policy in question. TSD policy is the same as JCPS’s apart from one sentence and one phrase. PSD policy includes the wording of JCPS’s but expands to include language specific to students who claim to be non-binary and citations of related PSD policies and Colorado law.

All three school district’s policies lead with the same sentence:

“In the planning of sleeping arrangements during overnight activity and athletic trips, the needs of transgender and non-binary students should be considered on a case-by-case basis with the goals of maximizing the student’s social integration and equal opportunity to participate in overnight activity and athletic trips, ensuring student safety and comfort, and minimizing stigmatization of the student.”

According to the district policies, it appears that the legal conflict currently playing out in JCPS could easily happen to local families.

In both TSD and PSD:

• Students are assigned overnight rooms according to their perceived gender identities.

• Biological boys could be assigned to sleep in rooms with biological girls.

• Parents and their children are not required to be told if their child is sharing sleeping quarters with a student of the opposite sex.

• Policy could require district staff to deceive parents and students to prevent disclosure of students’ gender identities.

• Policies do not provide for a clear way for parents to opt their children out of being assigned an overnight room based on gender identity rather than sex.

Are Parents Cool with This?

While local polling data is not available, national polling data indicates a broad lack of support for school policies which allow for sleeping arrangements according to perceived gender instead of biological sex. A national poll conducted by Competitive Edge Research & Communication found that 70% of men surveyed strongly opposed schools allowing students and staff to bunk with others according to gender identity instead of biological sex, on field trips. Fifty-two percent of those surveyed who identified themselves as ideologically liberal also strongly opposed such policies.

Should Districts Protect All Children Equally?

It seems to us that districts have caught themselves between the proverbial rock and hard place. We believe the intent of these policies is to provide for the respect and privacy of students suffering from gender dysphoria but are concerned when the equal protection of some students appears to violate the rights of other students. Do all children deserve to be treated with respect? Do district leaders believe that district policies should favor one set of students at the expense of another group of students? If so, who decides which group is favored and how should those decisions be made? Have district leaders read that famous book about the animals that try a system in which some animals are more equal than others?

Are district policies applied unequally to different groups of students even legal? What about the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment? We aren't lawyers but are curious about the legal implications of actions driven by these lop-sided policies.

We wonder if there are better options which protect the rights of all district children. ADF legal included a couple of suggestions which may allow for districts to extract themselves from their stuck position. Could districts provide an option which allows parents to opt-in to having their child share a room with a child of an opposite sex? Or could districts provide a pathway for parents to give permission for their child to room with a student of the opposite sex more broadly? We think there could be creative options that may provide ways to treat all students equally.

What Should You Do?

We believe all children deserve respect, so we wonder if district policies should be written and applied in ways that treat all students equally. Why would we want schools to divide students into groups and then treat those groups of students differently? How do students benefit by putting them into situations in which all kids involved could end up negatively affected?

Ask Questions

• Ask your school board members if they believe all students should be treated equally.

• Should parents be provided with the information they need to make decisions affecting the education and upbringing of their children?

• Do these policies which encourage dishonesty between school staff, families and their children enhance community trust or erode it?

• Ask TSD and PSD school board members if they are aware of the JCPS case and how their districts are responding.

• PSD is already embroiled in several legal suits—should we be concerned that their overnight policy may result in even more legal trouble for the district?

Compare the Policies

• ​Jefferson County Public Schools Policy (Denver metro, Colorado)

• ​Thompson School District (Loveland, Colorado)

• ​Poudre School District (Fort Collins, Colorado)

Pass Along the Information

• Please share this newsletter with your friends who are also interested in being open-minded, curious, and willing to consider thought-provoking questions!