MT. LEBANON, Pennsylvania — For decades, the Mt. Lebanon School District was not only lauded as one of the best school districts in the state, but it was also well-regarded throughout the country.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the school district received multiple National Blue Ribbon Awards from the U.S. Department of Education, which was one of the reasons I moved there in late 1989. In fact, from 1983 through the early 2000s, the elementary, middle, and junior high schools, as well as the high school fine arts programs, were all considered among the best in the country.
The tree-lined streets and mid-range to high-end homes were sought after, and people aspired to not only send their children to school there but to live there. They even considered it a point of pride that the district had no busing, and each child either walked to school or their parents dropped them off.
Because of the school district’s high marks, the town has evolved over the past twenty years as liberal enclaves of college-educated parents in Pittsburgh fled the big city because of its public schools’ decline in education standards and the increase in violence. With the influence of those progressive parents’ worldviews, the district changed, and by default, so did the school board and, ultimately, the curriculum.
This week, the school district became known for something outside of esteem when a Pennsylvania court issued a rule in favor of parents who alleged their civil rights were violated when the district’s seven elementary schools began teaching first-grade children about gender dysphoria and gender transitions. Joy Flowers Conti, a senior judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, ruled last week that the school district violated parents’ constitutional rights by refusing to give families the right to opt their children out of such lessons.
First grade teacher Megan Williams, who is the mother of a transgender child, read out loud to 6-year-old students several books that discussed gender transitioning and played a film in class about transitioning called Jacob’s New Dress. Williams told the young children that sometimes parents are wrong and doctors “make mistakes when they bring a child home from the hospital.”
Conti wrote that teachers directly repudiate parental authority if they instruct and read books to first graders to show that their parents’ beliefs about their gender identity may be wrong.
“The books read and Williams’ instruction to her first-grade students taught that gender is determined by the child — not, in accordance with the Parents’ beliefs, by God or biological reality,” Conti continued.
Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal foundation that worked with the parents, said in a statement that school districts violate parents’ rights to raise their children when this conduct is allowed. The group argued that Williams violated the parents’ rights by not giving them notice or a real chance to opt their children out of this type of controversial instruction.
This case is not that dissimilar to a pending case in Montgomery County School District in Maryland, where parents have been fighting to stop the district from forcing their children to listen to outside-the-box instructions on sexuality and gender. The Maryland school district removed the right to opt out without warning, and the parents are now petitioning the Supreme Court to reinstate the opt out.
Asta Kill, the president of Mt. Lebanon-based Lebo Pride, a nonprofit organization that promotes queer and gender-diverse education, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that everyone they talked to was upset and did not understand why the judge ruled this way.
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The problem began over two years ago, and despite parents bringing opt-out rights to the forefront with the Pennsylvania school district, the administration supported Williams and her supposed authority to use the books in class and not the parents’ rights to opt their children out.
Several parents have filed for a preliminary injunction to stop the district from giving such gender-identity lessons without parental opt-out rights.