‘Erroneous and abhorrent’: New York mother, teacher blasts school board for saying it’s ‘wrong’ to define gender as male and female

A New York mother and public-school teacher lambasted her school board in a five-minute speech for allowing leftist ideology into her children’s schools.

Adrienne Gummo castigated the Lancaster Central School District (LCSD) school board June 3 for effectively discriminating against conservative and Christian viewpoints.

“I’ve never come to speak at a board meeting,” Gummo began. “I did not speak last year when my daughter was barked at by members of the GSA [Gay-Straight Alliance] club when she politely said ‘No thank you’ to purchasing a Pride sticker. I did not speak this year when her teacher put up a Christmas tree in the classroom and adorned it with Pride flags, which some might consider desecration of a religious symbol.”

But the straw that broke the camel’s back was when her daughter’s teacher started pushing radical gender ideology in the classroom, which Gummo called “erroneous and abhorrent behavior for an educator.”

“One of my children was given an assignment where she was told to define gender. She wrote that gender is what you are when you are born, male or female,” Gummo told the board. “She was told she was wrong. Her teacher instructed her to change her answer to ‘gender is whatever you want to identify as.’

“This goes beyond what I will allow in my children’s education. It is not only our family’s belief that God created us as male or female, but it is also human biology and scientific fact.”

She then criticized LCSD’s lack of communication with parents, saying her child’s teacher “was not in any way understanding of my concerns.” Other district administrators, she said, simply never responded to her emails.

As a public-school teacher herself, Gummo knows what it means to leave her personal beliefs out of the classroom.

“As an educator, it is my job to teach children, but it is not my job to instill my views and my beliefs on them or on their families,” she said.  

But the opposite is true in her role as a parent.  

Gummo even recalled how when her oldest child was entering elementary school, writing a concerned letter to the principal got her blacklisted.  

“I was then permanently labeled in the school’s computer system as an HMP [which] stands for High-Maintenance Parent,” she told the school board.  

“If being involved in my children’s education and protecting them when I see them being discriminated against for their beliefs and values makes me high-maintenance, then so be it,” Gummo concluded.  

Her speech was met with applause from the audience.