A teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia reportedly urged students to walk out of class in protest of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s recent executive orders protecting parental rights and taking aim at the left’s radical LGBTQ agenda.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that a history teacher at West Potomac High School in Alexandria actually sent an email to students telling them that Youngkin’s directives are discriminatory against LGBTQ students, encouraging them to “come show your support” for the Pride Liberation Project’s scheduled student walk-out on Sept. 27 in protest of the governor's orders.
In a reversal from the previous rules, Youngkin’s new Department of Education policies state that public school faculty and staff cannot use a student’s preferred pronouns or name change without express written consent from the student’s parent, and that teachers and administrators can’t conceal information about a student’s “gender identity” from their parents.
Parents are also to be notified before their student is given any school-based counseling on gender identity.
The new rules fly in the face of some school district policies, including those of Fairfax County Schools and Loudoun County Public Schools in Northern Virginia, that instruct faculty and staff to use a child’s “preferred pronouns” and name while at school, as well as to conceal that information from parents if the student wanted it to be kept secret - all mandates that Youngkin rightly says violate parents' rights pertaining to their own kids.
“It’s not to exclude teachers, counselors, and administrators, but parents should be the first place and then they should be working together for the child’s benefit,” Youngkin said when rolling out the new policy.
Related: Youngkin Promotes Parental Voice Over Children’s Gender And Pronouns
“When circumstances present themselves and there is a child who is in fact considering this kind of issue parents should be notified and engaged. I think that’s just the best thing for the children of Virginia,” he added.
Which, while sounding like basic ideas to anyone with common sense, was apparently a bridge too far for the Fairfax teacher, who said in her email to students that the policies "may cause students to be outed given the parameters."
Maybe it's just me being a sensible parent here, but the only "outing" this teacher should be concerned with is being outed as an anti-parental rights propaganda shill who shouldn't be within sniffing distance of a classroom - much less one funded by tax dollars.