Three Colorado families are suing their Denver-area school district after the district assigned young students to room with transgender members of the opposite sex on school trips without informing the students or their parents.
In one case, Jefferson County Public Schools leaders assigned a boy who identifies as a female to share a hotel room with three fifth-grade girls on a trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. National Review previously wrote about the case last year.
In a second case, the district is accused of assigning an 18-year-old female who had just begun identifying as a male to serve as a counselor in a cabin full of sixth-grade boys on a school camping trip. Many of the young boys resorted to changing their clothes inside their sleeping bags to avoid exposing themselves to the counselor, parents say.
The families, along with the conservative law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, filed a federal lawsuit against the Jefferson County school district and school board on Wednesday in U.S. District Court. They claim that the district violated their religious and parental rights by “refusing to give them truthful, pertinent information about their children’s overnight accommodations.”
ADF lawyer Kate Anderson, in a prepared statement, said “parents, not the government, have the right and duty to direct the upbringing and education of their children, and that includes making informed decisions to protect their child’s privacy.”
A Jefferson County schools spokesperson said in an email that while the district hasn’t been formerly served with the lawsuit, they have conducted a “cursory review of what was filed with the court” and they “disagree with a number of claims made in it.”
“We look forward to having an opportunity in court to share the true facts, including the reasonable accommodations we offer families and students,” the district spokesperson said. “Families always have the ultimate choice whether their student participates in any unique programming that involves overnight accommodations. We take these issues seriously, and we follow all Colorado state laws when it comes to how we treat students, staff and families.”
Joe and Serena Wailes previously told National Review about their then-eleven-year-old daughter’s experience on a district-sponsored fifth-grade trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. They saw the trip in June 2023 as an opportunity for their daughter to travel with her classmates, learn more about the nation’s founding, and meet new friends from other Jefferson County district schools.
The Wailses paid $2,017 for their daughter to attend, and their daughter sold lemonade so she would have spending money for the trip, according to the lawsuit.
Serena Wailes also went on the trip but was not an official chaperone.
The Waileses were told that boys and girls would be roomed separately, and that their daughter would be assigned to a room with three other fifth-grade girls. But, according to the lawsuit, their daughter’s principal “did not reveal that rooms would be assigned based on gender identity because of” the district’s Transgender Students Policy.
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.
The Wailes’s daughter was assigned to room with two girls from her school and a student from another school. She made an effort on that first day to befriend the student from the other school, and offered to share a bed with her, her parents said.
Before bed on the first night, the student acknowledged being transgender.
The Wailes’s daughter snuck off to the bathroom to call her mom. “Her voice is shaky, and she says, ‘Mom, something just happened. I need to tell you about it,’” Serena Wailes told National Review last year.
The trip’s chaperones initially told the Wailes’s daughter to lie to her roommates, and to tell them she needed to switch beds to be closer to the air conditioner. They 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.
“Througout the evening, JeffCo employees always prioritized the male student’s privacy and feelings over” the Wailes’s daughter, the lawsuit says.
About six months before the Waileses sent their daughter on the trip, Bret and Susanne Roller sent their sixth-grade son on a district-sponsored science-lab camping trip. On the December 2022 trip, high-school-aged counselors were assigned to oversee the Outdoor Lab campers “whenever they are in the cabins, including when the sleep, change their clothes, and shower,” the lawsuit says.
When Susanne Roller picked her son up at school after the trip, the first thing he told her was, “I had a girl in my cabin,” according to the lawsuit.
The Rollers eventually learned that the counselor assigned to their son’s cabin was an 18-year-old female they knew through their 4-H Club. The female counselor “identified as a female at 4H only days before” the trip and “continued to identify as a female at 4H after the Outdoor lab,” the lawsuit states. In school, the female had identified as nonbinary.
The Rollers’s son and other boys were uncomfortable with having a female in their cabin.
The female counselor was assigned to stand outside the boys’ shower stalls to enforce showering time limits and to limit hot water usages. The shower stalls were only separated by a thin curtain, according to the lawsuit.
The Rollers’s son “and many other boys in his cabin decided together to refuse to shower during their entire stay at Outdoor Lab because they were too embarrassed and scared to shower in front of a female,” the lawsuit says.
The Rollers raised their concerns with their son’s principal, asking if he would be comfortable allowing an 18-year-old man to sleep in a cabin with 11-year-old girls. “I’ve never thought of it that way,” he responded, according to the lawsuit.
District administrators did not answer Susanne Roller’s questions about how to avoid the scenario in the future, the lawsuit says.
The Waileses also reached out to district leaders raising concerns about their policies. According to the lawsuit, the district would not promise to inform parents of its overnight rooming policy ahead of future trips or allow parents to opt out of its transgender policy.
The district did agree, going forward, to not “knowingly assign students of different birth sexes to share a bed.” That’s a hollow commitment, according to the lawsuit, because in neither case were students assigned to beds — they were assigned to cabins and hotel rooms, where they had to establish sleeping arrangements on their own.
It was “not a mistake” or an “accidental mix-up” that the Wailes’s and Rollers’s children were assigned to rooms with members of the opposite sex, the lawsuit says. “Instead, the district’s Policy played out as District officials intended,” it says.
Robert and Jade Perlman, the parents of a current sixth grader who is slated to participate in the Outdoor Lab trip in November, are also plaintiffs in the lawsuit. They also have a daughter who travels on overnight trips with her basketball team.
The district’s transgender rooming policy “is particularly concerning to the Perlmans because they do not want either of their children to room overnight with a student of the opposite sex,” according to the lawsuit.
The families allege that the district’s transgender rooming policy violates their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. They are calling for a court-ordered injunction requiring the district to inform parents ahead of school trips that their children could be roomed with a student of the opposite sex, and to honor requests from parents that their children not be roomed overnight with people of the opposite sex, “regardless of that person’s gender identity.”