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Parents met with the school staff at Rocklin Academy on Monday. Photo courtesy of CBS.
Summary: At the end of the last school term, a kindergarten teacher surprised her students with a transgender transitioning ceremony.
In July, a class full of five and six-year-olds were exposed to their first lesson in coming out as transgender. A teacher in California held a transitioning ceremony for one of her students, where she reintroduced a biological boy as a girl and asked the class to call the student by her new name.
According to Fox News, the surprise event at Rocklin Academy School was met with mixed reactions from parents who were not informed of it beforehand. Some applauded the teacher’s progressiveness, while others felt it was inappropriate. Those in the latter group have even considered filing a lawsuit, according to Activist Mom.
“I’m so proud of my students, it was never my intent to harm any students but to help them through a difficult situation,” the teacher said in a meeting on Monday.
Ankur Dhawan told Fox News that his daughter, 5, came home after the ceremony and talked about how some girls can be trapped in a boy’s body. Dhawan said that he appreciated learning something new.
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“This turned out to be a fairly decent way of introducing a topic that I wouldn’t otherwise know to do,” Dhawan said.
But while some parents were fine with the ceremony, others went to the Pacific Justice Institute and the California Family Council for representation, and both organizations spoke to Fox on the parents’ behalf.
“They’re concerned that they weren’t notified this was coming,” said Greg Burt, director of capitol engagement with the California Family Council. “These kids who had never struggled with their gender identity before are all of a sudden scared they could be turned into a boy.”
During the transition ceremony, the teacher showed the kindergarteners two books about coming out as transgender and told the students to call a student who was born male a girl. The ceremony occurred this summer at the end of last year’s term.
School officials said that the teacher had not obtained prior approval to read the books and that parents were notified a week after the ceremony. In the notification letter, the school did not include the word “transgender.”
“The majority of parents who had children in this kindergarten did not think that it would be age appropriate,” Pacific Justice Institute President Brad Dacus said to Fox News.
On July 31st, the school board held a special meeting about the ceremony, and they defended the teacher’s decision to read the books, saying that not reading the books would have put them at risk of being discriminatory.
The school board said that being inclusive would help them avoid a lawsuit, but ironically, some parents are gearing up to sue. However, it is unclear as to whether they will actually file a lawsuit as the school board is listening to their complaints, which include asking for more notifications whenever outside materials are read in class.
“These parents feel betrayed by the school district that they were not notified,” Karen England with the Capitol Resource Institute told CBS News.
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