A group of concerned parents are challenging a public school policy that permits the assignment of students of the opposite gender to share hotel rooms and bunkhouses during overnight school trips without parental notification or consent.
Joe and Serena Wailes filed a lawsuit, accusing Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado of placing their 11-year-old daughter in a shared room with an alleged biological boy on an overnight school trip.
The Wailes aren’t the only family who are complaining about the district’s policy of assigning males who identify as girls to female hotel rooms on overnight school trips.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys are also representing Bret and Susanne Roller and Rob and Jade Perlman.
The parents allege that the district policy violates their fundamental right to make important decisions about their children’s care, upbringing, and education.
The case is currently pending at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver.
“Today in court, we challenge the district's policy that keeps parents in the dark and harms children,” Wailes said this week. “All children deserve the right to be comfortable with whom they are assigned to share a room with on these overnight trips and our public schools should not be making these consequential decisions without parent involvement.”
Jefferson County Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
Representing the parents in the case, ADF attorney Noel Sterett argued that parents know best about what their children need and their children's religious development.
“When Joe and Serena Wales sent their 11-year-old daughter on an overnight trip, they had no idea that their daughter would be assigned to share a hotel room with a male student,” Sterett said. “Parents like the Wales must be able to make the consequential decisions about their child's care whether or not their child would sleep next to a student of the opposite sex or shower in front of a student of the opposite sex.”
"All children deserve to be comfortable with who they have to sleep next to or shower in front of but when schools hide information from parents, everyone should be concerned," he added.