Parents push for state law requiring school notification about gender-identity change

DENVER | Erin Lee, a mother of three from Larimer County, sits behind a folding table at a homeschooling conference in south Denver. She brightly greets a woman walking by who is bouncing a baby on her hip. She asks for her signature to get a proposed ballot initiative in front of voters this November. Lee explains what it would do.

“If a child is experiencing gender incongruence or identifying as the opposite sex at school, that the parents need to be notified,” Lee said. “Signing it doesn’t say that you agree or disagree, it just says that you think that Colorado voters should have a say in November,” Lee said.

The proposed initiative, if it gets on the ballot and then passes, would require schools to notify parents when a student socially transitions in some way, which could be using a different name or pronouns or bathrooms at school, for example.

The handling of gender in schools varies district to district. These can be issues related to the availability of LGBTQ+ focused clubs to how schools manage pronoun changes. Some districts have adopted guidelines in which parental involvement in a student’s gender transition is optional, others lack specific procedures.

But this is changing: A new state law will soon require written policies for non-legal name changes and the usage of student’s chosen names; the legislation doesn’t address parental involvement.

“We’re hearing from people across the state that they believe parents should be involved, that they are the ones that are directly responsible for the care and upbringing of their child, and to be left out or to be cut out by the school, is causing real harm. So people are excited to sign the petition,” said Lori Gimelshteyn, a mother from Aurora who is also a co-representative on the ballot initiative with Lee.

The Parental Notice of Gender Incongruence ballot initiative was filed with the state by Lee and Gimelshteyn filed in January. The pair, along with Protect Kids Colorado, a religious political advocacy group, have been organizing and circulating petitions for the initiative at bars, rodeos and churches since May.

‘Parents might not be safe’
Gimelshteyn says that her organization, the Colorado Parent Advocacy Network, a group that has advocated against gender guidelines in schools and access to Colorado’s crisis hotline for children, has received 22 reports so far this year from families concerned about how their schools have handled issues related to gender identity.

Lee is motivated by her own experience in Poudre School District. In 2021, a teacher invited her sixth grade daughter to an after school club.

“So she gets there and it’s actually gender and sexuality awareness,” Lee said.

In Lee’s retelling of the incident, a guest speaker talked to the Gender & Sexualities Alliance club at Wellington Middle-High School that day about topics including gender, attraction and queerness.

“They repeatedly reiterated that parents might not be safe, that this is a confidential meeting, that what you hear in here, keep in here,” Lee said.

Poudre School District didn’t directly respond to questions from KUNC about the content of the meeting. A district spokesperson wrote in an email that anecdotally, most students within the district do tell their parents about their desire to socially transition.

“By law, students have the right to be free from discrimination and have access to a safe and inclusive learning environment. The District does not condone anyone suggesting to a student that they should not be forthright with their families,” a district spokesperson wrote in an email.

Lee’s daughter told her parents about the meeting and soon after told them she was transgender. In the following months, Lee says the child suffered significant mental health distress.

“It’s dangerous to have these conversations outside the purview of the parents, and especially in these mental health crises situations,” Lee said.

Lee blames the content of the GSA club for her child’s mental health struggles. In the years since, she has become an advocate for parental rights in schools, suing the district, making a documentary about the experience and now circulating the ballot initiative to require the inclusion of parents.

‘Why would your parents not be included in this process?’
“If families could be involved in kids coming out and transitions, that is ideal,” Bethy Leonardi, the co-director of A Queer Endeavor at CU Boulder’s School of Education, said.

Leonardi has worked with several Northern Colorado districts, including Boulder Valley, to implement their gender guidelines. Currently those guidelines suggest caregiver involvement but don’t require it. Many families, she says, just aren’t on board.

“If kids are afraid to tell their parents, that’s information,” Leonardi said. “And we need to listen to them and we need to say, ‘Okay, so why would your parents not be included in this process? Let’s talk about that’.”

According to the 2023 Healthy Kids Colorado survey, two percent of Colorado middle schoolers and 2.9 percent of high schoolers identify as transgender. How schools manage these identities is controversial, playing out in board of education meetings and in statehouses around the country.

“I think that’s why there is a conflict, is that these are deeply felt moral principles that people are expressing,” Terri Wilson, a philosopher of education at CU Boulder, said.

Beneath the politics and rhetoric are real feelings, values that Wilson describes as moral claims.

“Parents want to know what is happening with their children and want to understand what is happening in school is, you know, a kind of moral claim,” Wilson said. “It is also a moral claim of being respectful of the autonomy of students, being welcoming, creating safe spaces that allow students to learn and grow and flourish.”

Erin Lee says her family is past the crisis. Her daughter no longer says she’s transgender or depressed and is now in a private Christian school. Meanwhile, they’re focused on gathering the nearly 125,000 required signatures by the Monday, Aug. 5 deadline.

“We anticipate this isn’t just going to be a 2024 effort. If we don’t get the signatures, we absolutely will be back,” Lee said.