“Good morning, boys and girls…and others?”
The traditional school day is being turned upside down in one Maryland school district. The addition of a third gender option and some “safe space” classrooms for small children that somehow identify as LGBT are changing the way schools address and teach children.
The Montgomery County Public School District in Rockville, Maryland announced some fresh new policies that impact the way teachers and staff can refer to students, whether students have had a legal name change or not.
The school district also implemented some other “woke” policies, including one that allows students to announce their own gender. They can now be boys, girls, or the mysterious “X”, the symbol that the school has adopted for a “third gender”.
This summer, Montgomery County quietly rolled out these an other LGBT compliant policies, from gender neutral bathrooms to the way staff can address students. Students can change their names and pronouns without legal paperwork – they simply select the name that they want to be called, and decide what gender they wish to be referred to as. Staff is required to comply.
This particular policy should go over well with Middle Schoolers, who are already some of the most challenging kids to manage in a classroom. “Call me Ted today”, “Nope, never mind, it’s Mary” and “I am gender X, because it is Tuesday” seems to be a likely consequence of giving 5th graders this much power over their teachers.
Staff must call kids by their chosen names, and refer to them by their stated gender, or face sanctions from the school board. Since the school is not to require any kind of legal notice of change, kids can change things up on a whim, making classroom management far more challenging and complex for teachers.
In addition to gender and name choice, each school must provide a safe space, just for LGBT students. This includes children as young as five years old. “Safe zone” stickers have been created to identify these spaces and teachers will need to undergo additional training to be able to have a “safe space” classroom.
Some areas, including offices, classrooms and recreational spots are to be considered safe zones, just in case they are needed by LGBT students.
School districts in Maryland, Washington D.C. and Virginia were swift to follow suit, instituting their own “safe space” policies for even young elementary students. Across the country in Oak Park CA, parents are battling the school district over the LGBT classes the district has planned for young students.
Students in Oak Park are set to learn that “gender is self defined” and that “there are many gender identities” while still in elementary school. Parents in that district are fighting the introduction of these topics at such an early age, but the school is committed to their stated curriculum.
School has just begun in Maryland, so there is no word yet on how well the “safe spaces” for LGBT 2nd graders are working out, or how many kids are opting to be gender X instead of boys or girls.
