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 decision. 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.”In March, MCPS officials, backed by the county’s board of education, said the removal option would be discontinued for the 2023-2024 school year.
She wrote, ‘When courts have found free exercise violations based on public-school curricula, the challenged curricula involved more than exposure to ideas. The curricula required conduct that conflicted with students’ faiths.” A Muslim civil rights group, though not a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit, said it anticipates “impacted families” to engage in “respectful acts of peaceful civil disobedience” in response to ThuFrsday’s decision.
The school district announced the “inclusivity” reading program in the fall of 2022, targeting pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students. Becket said one book directs three- and four-year-old students to find images from a vocabulary list including “‘intersex flag,’ ‘drag queen,’ ‘underwear,’ ‘leather,’ and the name of a celebrated LGBTQ activist and sex worker.”
Hisham M. Garti, outreach director of the Montgomery County Muslim Council, took issue with the district’s assertion. In an affidavit filed with the district court on July 26, he said MCPS officials who met with him and CAIR Maryland director Zainab Chaudry on May 1 only said “a few parents of the LGBTQ community complained” that students leaving the classes had “offended” some classmates and that some students “had their feelings hurt.
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