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Parents have no right to opt their elementary school-age children out of Montgomery County Public Schools classes featuring storybooks dealing with human sexuality and gender, a federal judge ruled Thursday. The court also said MCPS — the state’s largest school district — did not have to notify parents of when such texts will be presented in class.
Attorneys for the parents — Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Protestants — said they would appeal the judge’s rejection of their request for an injunction. They claim Maryland law mandates both advance notice and opt-out provisions for texts that “advocate pride parades, gender transitioning, and pronoun preferences for kids as young as pre-kindergarten.”
The plaintiffs sued to block MCPS from canceling the opt-out option previously offered.
Late Thursday, the district issued a statement responding to the decision. “MCPS remains committed to cultivating an inclusive and welcoming learning environment and creating opportunities where all students see themselves and their families in curriculum materials,” the statement said.
The district said it would continue “to include instructional materials that reflect the diversity of the local and global community by exploring the aspirations, issues, and achievements of women and men, people with disabilities, people from diverse racial, ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds, as well as those of diverse gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.”
In March, MCPS officials, backed by the county’s board of education, said the removal option would be discontinued for the 2023-2024 school year. Additionally, parents would no longer get advance notice about the readings.
In a 60-page decision, federal district Judge Deborah L. Boardman, a 2021 Biden appointee, rejected claims that removing the opt-out option violated parents’ religious free exercise and agreed with MCPS’ argument that children “are not being directly or indirectly coerced into activity that violates their religious beliefs.”
On Thursday afternoon, a spokesman for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the public interest law firm representing the parents, said they would appeal the ruling to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, a panel Judge Boardman’s opinion acknowledged hasn’t yet considered the issues in this case.
However, the judge wrote, “Every [other] court that has addressed the question has concluded that the mere exposure in public school to ideas that contradict religious beliefs does not burden the religious exercise of students or parents.”
She wrote, ‘When courts have found free exercise violations based on public-school curricula, the challenged curricula involved more than exposure to ideas. The curricula required conduct that conflicted with students’ faiths.”
Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said the ruling would harm parents and students.
“Parents know and love their children best; that’s why all kids deserve to have their parents help them understand issues like gender identity and sexuality,” Mr. Baxter said. “The School Board’s decision to cut parents out of these discussions flies in the face of parental freedom, childhood innocence, and basic human decency.”
A Muslim civil rights group, though not a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, said it anticipates “impacted families” to engage in “respectful acts of peaceful civil disobedience” in response to Thursday’s decision.
“The campaign to protect the rights of parents and children in Montgomery County Public Schools is just beginning,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement. “As the school year begins, we remain committed to vocally advocating for families who simply want their children to attend English class without being forced to discuss and affirm sensitive concepts that would normally arise in sex education courses.”
The school district announced the “inclusivity” reading program in the fall of 2022, targeting pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students. Becket said one book directs three- and four-year-old students to find images from a vocabulary list including “‘intersex flag,’ ‘drag queen,’ ‘underwear,’ ‘leather,’ and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.”
The law firm said another book pushed a “child-knows-best approach to gender transitioning” and claimed teachers were “instructed to say doctors only ‘guess’ when identifying a newborn [child’s]” gender.
Initially, MCPS said they would allow parents to remove their children from classes where books such as “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope,” “Pride Puppy,” and “Love, Violet” would be read and discussed. In court filings, MCPS officials said “individual schools could not accommodate the growing number of [opt-out] requests without causing significant disruptions to the classroom environment and undermining MCPS’s educational mission.”
Hisham M. Garti, outreach director of the Montgomery County Muslim Council, took issue with the district’s assertion. In an affidavit filed with the district court on July 26, he said MCPS officials who met with him and CAIR Maryland director Zainab Chaudry on May 1 only said “a few parents of the LGBTQ community complained” that students leaving the classes had “offended” some classmates and that some students “had their feelings hurt.”
Mr. Garti said, “At no point did [MCPS chief academic officer] Dr. [Peggy A.] Pugh or any other MCPS official claim that the number of students requesting opt-outs had become too burdensome or disrupted the functioning of their schools.”
Addressing an online “community webinar” on Tuesday evening, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIR’s deputy executive director, claimed the school district could supply “not a single email, not a single chart, not a single number. Nothing at all, about the issue of too many kids opting out … being the reason the opt-out was canceled,” when asked by a local media outlet.
CAIR also claimed that officials encouraged teachers to “disrupt the either/or thinking” of pupils who voice traditional values in class.
Mr. Mitchell said an MCPS “Sample Student Call-Ins” document obtained by the group “advises teachers to tell students who express a traditional view about relationships that their comment is ‘hurtful’ and that students shouldn’t use … ‘negative words.’”
“The documents we found clearly indicate that the school system is saying one thing in public and saying something quite differently behind the scenes,” Mr. Mitchell said during the Tuesday evening webinar.
Mr. Baxter, the Becket attorney, vowed to continue the legal battle.
“The court’s decision is an assault on children’s right to be guided by their parents on complex and sensitive issues regarding human sexuality,” he said. “The School Board should let kids be kids and let parents decide how and when to best educate their own children consistent with their religious beliefs.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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