School policy requires that students be roomed with classmates who share their gender identity, rather than their sex.
After finishing fifth grade, Joe and Serena Wailes’s eleven-year-old daughter was excited to travel to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., with some of her Colorado classmates.
The trip last June, sponsored by the Jefferson County School District near Denver, offered the kids an opportunity to learn more about the nation’s founding, which they’d been studying.
It also offered them an opportunity to meet new friends from other schools in the district.
The Waileses said their daughter was assigned to room with three other students — two girls from her school, and one from another school. She made an effort on that first day to befriend the student from the other school. She even offered to share a bed with her.
But the Waileses said their daughter was put in a “really, really hard situation” and an extremely uncomfortable position when, just before bed the first night, her bedmate acknowledged that she was really a biological male who identifies as a transgender female.
The room assignment was made despite repeated assurances from district leaders that boys and girls would be roomed on different hotel floors, the Waileses told National Review.
The family is now calling for district leaders to update a policy that they say is focused on protecting the privacy of transgender students and minimizing their stigmatization, but doesn’t do enough to protect the rights of other students and their parents, particularly in roommate assignments. With the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm that supports religious liberty, the Waileses sent a demand letter to district leaders on Monday calling for them to clarify their policy to ensure that parents of all students are informed of the sex of their children’s roommates before any school-sponsored trips, and that parents be allowed to opt their children out of any policy that rooms students by gender identity rather than by sex.
“The policy, it basically tells them to hide this kind of issue from parents,” Joe Wailes said. “It’s not a transparent policy. It’s a one-sided policy, but it doesn’t protect all kids’ privacy equally.”
Asked to respond to the Wailes’s allegations, the school district said that travel arrangements for the trip were made by a private company and emphasized that district personnel were unaware of the transgender student’s sex when rooms were assigned.
“In Jeffco Public Schools, student safety is paramount and partnership with families is a priority. We take this situation seriously. Because the district was only recently informed, and the trip occurred outside of the school year and through a private travel organization, we are still determining facts,” a district spokesman said in a statement provided to National Review. “However, it appears that the student’s transgender status was not known when room assignments were made and our understanding is that as soon as their transgender identity was known, room assignments were adjusted.”
The district’s five school-board members did not respond to emails from National Review.
Kate Anderson, an ADF lawyer representing the family, said the district’s policy of hiding the sex of students in roommate assignments violates parents’ “constitutional right to direct the upbringing and education of their kids.” Parents should know if their young child is going to be roomed with a student of the opposite sex, regardless of what gender the student identifies as.
“This is a private space,” Anderson said. “We’re talking about the same bed.”
The district’s transgender policy says that when it comes to assigning roommates on trips, “the needs of students who are transgender shall be assessed on a case-by-case basis with the goals of maximizing the student’s social integration” and “ensuring the student’s safety and comfort, and minimizing the stigmatization of the student.”
“In most cases, students who are transgender should be assigned to share overnight accommodations with other students that share the student’s gender identity consistently asserted at school,” the policy states. “Any student who is transgender or not, who has a need or desire for increased privacy, regardless of the underlying reason, should be provided with a reasonable accommodation, which may include a private room.”
The policy adds that under no circumstances “shall a student who is transgender be required to share a room with students whose gender identity conflicts with their own.”
The Waileses said their daughter was really looking forward to the June trip. She was making lists of things she was looking forward to seeing and doing. While she had friends on the trip, “she was really open to getting to know other people on the trip as well,” Serena Wailes said.
Their daughter was assigned three roommates, the Waileses said, two girls from her school, and a student from another school. “She purposely went out of her way on that first day to make friends with this other student and to make her feel comfortable in the room and in the rooming situation,” Serena Wailes said. “She purposely wanted to share a bed with this kid, initially.”
It was just before bedtime when the transgender student acknowledged being transgender to the Wailes’s daughter. She eventually snuck into the bathroom and quietly called her mother, who was on the trip.
“Her voice is shaky, and she says, ‘Mom, something just happened. I need to tell you about it,’” Serena Wailes recalled.
Joe Wailes, who was not on the trip, talked to his daughter on the phone, and “you could tell she was shook up,” he said.
Serena Wailes asked a teacher at her daughter’s school to come to the lobby. That teacher then called the school’s principal. According to the ADF demand letter, the principal called the transgender student’s parents, who confirmed that their child was, in fact, transgender and was supposed to be operating in “stealth mode.”
The chaperones instructed the Wailes’s daughter to lie to her roommates by telling them she needed to switch beds to be closer to the air conditioner, the letter states. But one of the other roommates offered to allow the trans student to switch beds as well, to continue with the original sleeping arrangements. The Wailes’s daughter, back in an uncomfortable position, went out to the hallway and called her mom again.
“She didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings,” Serena Wailes said.
The trip chaperones eventually moved the trans student and one of the other girls to another room, falsely claiming that one of the girls, who was sick, needed more space.
The ADF letter alleges that “throughout the entire evening” the trans student’s “privacy and feelings were always the primary concerns of JCPS employees.”
“Because of JCPS’s policy, [the Wailes’ daughter] was placed in a position where her privacy and comfort were not respected or even considered,” the letter states. “Her privacy was violated.”
The Waileses said they didn’t have any reason to be concerned about their daughter’s roommate assignment before the trip, because “we were clearly told that there were going to be boys on one floor, girls on another,” Serena Wailes said.
Although the Waileses are Catholic, Joe Wailes said “to me, this isn’t a strictly religious issue.”
Serena Wailes said they don’t hold the teachers or their principal at fault for putting her daughter in an uncomfortable position. “We love the teachers that were on this trip, we love the principal, and we love the school,” she said. “We feel like they were also put in a very precarious situation, because they were trying to deal with this in the spur of the moment.”
The Waileses have twin fourth graders. They are hoping to get the policy around roommate assignments clarified and updated before their other kids are old enough for the trip.
Anderson, the ADF lawyer, said it should be an easy fix.
“Parents are signing a ton of paperwork when they are signing a child up for an overnight trip,” she said. “This should be part of those papers, and let parents have notice that this is how students are going to be roomed, and have the opportunity to deal with that and opt their kids out of it.”
Anderson said they haven’t heard from the school district since submitting their letter, but she is “very hopeful that the district will agree that parents need to know this information.”
“We’re hopeful we can just work this out with the district,” she said.
The district told National Review that it is working to learn more information from the company that arranged the students’ travel and plans to respond to ADF by the December 18 deadline provided.