North Dakota school district to ignore state law, keep hiding kids’ pronouns from parents

(Daily Caller News Foundation) – A North Dakota school district has decided to continue to keep hiding students’ gender transitions from parents, despite a new state law prohibiting such actions.

Fargo Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Rupak Gandhi originally announced the plans to ignore the state law on May 9, a day after Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum signed HB1522 into law which prohibits schools from concealing “information about a student’s transgender status from the student’s parent or legal guardian.” Parents pushed back on the decision at a Tuesday meeting, calling for transparency in their child’s education. 

“My two children are my two children, not yours,” a mother told the school board on Tuesday. “If very important information is being shared with a teacher or staff member and you withhold that information from me, the parent, god forbid something happened to my child.”

The decision to defy the law is because the school district does not want to “openly out” a student to their parents because doing that may “cause harm to that child,” Gandhi told the school community on May 9. The decision is not meant to be “against” parents, Gandhi said at the school board meeting.

“We will not openly out any student because of one law if we know that that’s going to cause harm to that child,” Gandhi said at the May 9 meeting.

Throughout the country, parents are pushing back against school districts that are hiding their child’s gender transitions; in Maine, a mother is suing a school district that allegedly kept her daughter’s gender transition a secret and provided the 13-year-old girl with multiple chest binders. Two Colorado families sued a school district, alleging that staff convinced their daughters to join a “secret” club aiming to transition students and conceal the club’s activities from parents.

“You teach your kids that nobody who asks you to keep a secret is safe,” one mother told the school board on Tuesday. “Now, this is going the other way. This is an adult saying that they’ll keep a child’s secret.”

Fargo Public Schools did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.