Update 12/8/22: A reply brief has been filed with the court. You can read it here.
Every year, the fifth grade students at Los Alamitos Unified School District (“LAUSD”) schools attend an outdoor science camp. The four-day camp is one of the most anticipated events of the year, as the kids look forward fun and games, science experiments, and learning about the great outdoors.
This changed in 2022. Still calling it “Outdoor Science School” and without breathing a word of the change to parents (let alone asking for their consent), LAUSD, for reasons unknown, decided to hire an organization that appears to specialize in LGBTQ retreats.
Far from their parents, and with no way to call home, Suzy and Rachel’s fifth grade daughters were exposed, for the first time, to ideas about gender identity, “preferred pronouns,” and a variety of related subjects.
“Are you a girl, or are you a boy?” one little girl asked, when she saw the counselor who would be staying overnight in the girl’s dormitory. The response: “I prefer ‘they/them’ pronouns.”
These new ideas were extremely confusing – even traumatizing – to both girls, as well as to many other children at the camp. When she returned home, Rachel says that the change to her daughter’s personality could not have been more obvious. Far from her usual, bubbly self, Rachel’s daughter was silent. She didn’t mention to her mother what had happened at the camp for ten days.
Little by little, parents became aware of the situation, each from their own child. Skeptical at first, the parents who looked up the camp online were shocked by what they found – a policy prohibiting parental visitation; another policy prohibiting cell phones; an ad describing the camp as the “Best LGBTQ-Friendly Retreat in Southern California;” and numerous parental complaints about the sexually suggestive content of the camp’s program. This, along with the number of sexually questionable social media posts from the camp led parents to wonder just what LAUSD had been thinking.
Finally, a group of parents got together and demanded answers from the school:
· Why had the school selected this particular camp?
· What sort of investigation took place before picking it? Had anyone even done an online search?
· Why had the school failed to tell parents what sort of camp it was?
· Were our daughters housed with biological men?
We have yet to obtain answers to most of these questions. Instead, the school stonewalled parents for months, even going so far as to claim that answering them was illegal.
Parents deserve an answer: LAUSD must be held to account for what it did, make amends, and prevent this from happening again. To that end, the group of interested parents have enlisted the help of the Lex Rex Institute, led by attorney Alexander Haberbush, who has filed a lawsuit on their behalf.
No parent should be considered irrelevant when it comes to the safety and upbringing of their child. Parents have the right to know who will be in private spaces with their young daughters, especially when they send them away to a camp sponsored by the District. They have the right to decide when and if their young children are taught about gender ideologies.
School districts have no authority strip parents of these rights.
We are fighting for the rights of parents. We are fighting to prevent this from happening to other little girls in the future. Legal work isn’t cheap. We need your help to support our legal efforts and ensure that parents retain authority and control over the upbringing and education of their children. Contribute to the cause at www.GiveSendGo.org/LosAl
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