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.”Late Thursday, the district issued a statement responding to the decision.
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. Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket, said the ruling would harm parents and students.
“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.
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.
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.
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