A Maryland school district is in trouble after a training video surfaced that instructs overnight field trip chaperones on how to accommodate transgender students. The key point kicking up a storm? Chaperones are not allowed to tell parents that their children might be bunking with members of the opposite sex on school trips.
Anne Arundel County Public Schools wanted to make their schools “safe spaces” for kids who identify as transgender, so they produced a training video, starring the district’s chief communications officer, Bob Mosier. The video surfaced a few days ago on The American Conservative, but was uploaded in mid-July.
In it, Mosier makes a few key suggestions to teachers and chaperones who take students on overnight trips. Chief among them is the advice that if a transgender student wants to sleep with students of the opposite sex, just let them. But since the school values the transgender student’s privacy, make sure no one tells the parents.
“So, many of you might be asking yourselves, ‘So I’m at an overnight field trip, and I have a student who’s biologically a male, identifies as a female, and we’ve worked with that student and her family, and that student wants to sleep in the dorms, or whatever sleeping arrangements are, with the females,’” Mr. Mosier says in the video.
“They don’t want to sleep in a room by themselves; they want to sleep with the rest of the females. So what do we do? And the answer is, they sleep with the females…That’s not the easy answer; it’s the right answer. And in some cases, it’s going to cause issues, because … the private information piece doesn’t allow you to share that with parents of all of the other campers.”
Mosier told local media that “gender identity is a confidential matter.”
Understandably, parents in the school district were unhappy to learn that teachers and administrators wouldn’t warn them of such a delicate situation, particularly considering their own children’s privacy was at risk.
The video was made following the Obama Administration’s edict that schools make accommodations for transgender students – letting them use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender they identify with, for example. That order has since been temporarily suspended by a federal judge in Texas following a lawsuit from school districts in several states.
