FALLS CHURCH, Virginia (LifeSiteNews) – School teachers in a Virginia district have been instructed to forego consulting parents when students as young as 5-years-old wish to change their gender identity while in school, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Fairfax County Public Schools has instituted a new training program for its teaching staff, informing them that students do not require parental consent in order to have teachers address them by their “preferred pronoun,” use the locker room and bathroom according to their elected identity, and even change their gender identity to “identify as male, female, or nonbinary” as recognized on official records in a school’s “Student Information System” (SIS).
The training program, entitled “Supporting Gender-Expansive and Transgender Youth,” was required of teachers and, according to the Washington Free Beacon, educators could not progress through the module without selecting the “correct” answers to questions on student gender identity permissions.
NEW. Our @IWN parent advocate Stephanie Lundquist-Arora got this scoop. @fcpsnews is putting teachers through reeducation training: “Supporting Gender-Expansive and Transgender Youth.”
Q: “Parent permission is required for which of the following?”
A: “None of the above.”
🤯1/2 pic.twitter.com/azBdg4aR0s— Asra Q. Nomani 🐾 (@AsraNomani) July 5, 2022
Teachers were asked if they thought parental permission would be required if “[a] student requests that the teacher call him by his chosen name in his classes … A student requests to use the locker room that corresponds with her identified gender,” or if a “student requests the use of a private bathroom.” The correct answer was reportedly “none of the above.”
Additionally, teachers were asked what updates students could request to be made to their SIS records, with the required answers being to “change their name, without parent permission” and to “identify as male, female, or non-binary.”
Our @IWN member Stephanie Lundquist-Arora got this image from new @fcpsnews teacher reeducation:
Q: “With the updates to the Student Information System, students can choose to do the following:”
A: ✅ “Change their name, WITHOUT PARENT PERMISSION”@FCPSSupt, this is NOT OK. pic.twitter.com/XybcJTjg4a— Asra Q. Nomani 🐾 (@AsraNomani) July 5, 2022
Notably, an option which would have required students to procure “appropriate legal name change documentation” before being permitted to change their name on school documents was to be left unchecked.
In comments to the Washington Free Beacon, parent Stephanie Lundquist-Arora said that the administrative decision to “remain hyper-focused on politicizing education is “unconscionable,” especially in light of “plummeting standardized test scores and record-level teacher vacancies in Fairfax County Public Schools.”
“This recent ‘gender-inclusive’ training, meant to indoctrinate teachers and keep parents from knowing critical information about their own children, is irresponsible and borderline criminal,” she charged.
LifeSiteNews reached out to Fairfax County Public Schools for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.
In May, Fairfax County Public Schools proposed introducing punishments for schoolchildren who fail to address students by their preferred gender pronouns, regardless of that corresponding with their biological sex, or for refusing to call students by a newly chosen name, rather than their birth name.
A revised version of the school district’s 70-page “Students Rights and Responsibilities” (SRR) handbook noted that students in the district could be punished and even suspended for so-called “hate speech,” which includes “deadnaming” and “misgendering” classmates who identify as a different gender.