Directive quotes federal law that purports to require parental access to school information
By Guy Page
Parents do not have a right to any school information about their child’s sexual identity or gender expression, a Vermont Agency of Education directive says.
In fact, school staffers who tell parents information about their child’s gender identity may actually be breaking the law, the directive states.
“ Continuing Best Practices for Schools Regarding Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students” was published in February, 2017. AOE published the document because “many questions arise for students and school staff when considering the best supports for
transgender and gender nonconforming students. These sample procedures are designed to provide direction for schools to address issues that may arise concerning the needs of transgender and gender nonconforming students.”
The document also says, in bold type, that the direction is not meant to be one-size-fits-all. “No single policy, approach, or accommodation will apply in all circumstances. Schools must determine supports for transgender and gender nonconforming students on a case-by-case basis, informed by the individual student’s needs.”
But in the matter of disclosing information about student gender identity, AOE says telling parents may actually violate the law, and in any case should be left to the child.
“Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), only those school employees with a legitimate educational need should have access to a student’s records or the information contained within those records. Disclosing confidential student information to other employees, students, parents [italics added], or other third parties may violate privacy laws, including but not limited to FERPA. Transgender or gender nonconforming students have the ability, as do all students, to discuss and express their gender identity and gender expression openly and decide when, with whom, and how much of their private information to share with others.”
So if a parent asks a school staff member what pronouns he or she is using, or whether he or she is expressing transgender thoughts or reading transgender material, school staffers are not only discouraged from telling parents, but may actually be in violation of the ‘Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act,’ AOE says.
Yet the FERPA was written in 1974 to give parents more access to records, not less.
According to CDC information on FERPA, “The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law enacted in 1974 that protects the privacy of student education records. FERPA applies to any public or private elementary, secondary, or post-secondary school. It also applies to any state or local education agency that receives funds under an applicable program of the US Department of Education. The Act serves two primary purposes: It gives parents or eligible students more control over their educational records, and it prohibits educational institutions from disclosing “personally identifiable information in education records” without the written consent of an eligible student, or if the student is a minor, the student’s parents (20 U.S.C.S. § 1232g(b)).
Categories: Education
Parents have no rights. over their own children. is what they really want to happen. Woke jokes have gone way to far. These people must be stopped at all cost. Allow me to clearly state that solely does the parent or parents have all rights and are held solely responsible for their children. These people who talk about laws such as this. that where made behind closed doors without due process. are in fact unlawful orders by tyrants. Who must be brought to justice. No such schools or the staff. should ever withhold any information about any child. to the adult parents for any reason. It is the sole responsibility of the parent or parents to rise their children. Not any damm business of any schools or staff. This mental illness has been taken advantage of. by these kinds of people, and made into kind acceptable behaviors. There are only two genders male and female! everything else is a form of mental illness. in very rare cases a physical medical disorder. that can be corrected. in those even rarer cases that medical treatments can’t fix the problems. there is support for those people. by no means is this issue a matter of under age children’s learning institutions. By no means is adults sexual behaviors, preferences, what they do in their bedrooms. Be allowed to be a topic in under age children’s learning institutions. Nor should those with these kinds of mental illness. be allowed to be staffed by any under age learning institutions in this country. This has gone way to far outside. the Realm of good healthly morals and values. that parents are responsible for teaching their children. We all Weather we have children or not. we as a whole have failed our youths if we continue to allow this kind of horrific abuse of our children.
Well I agree with much of what you wrote But not all.
“No such schools or the staff. should ever withhold any information about any child. to the adult parents for any reason. “
I will posit that in the case where a parent is responsible for the child’s pregnancy, that might be an exception to that rule. I bring that up because it has happened more than once in the state.
Aside from that, most of what you wrote I agree with.
I also find it fascinating that the article states the word may, many times.
The order may be illegal.
Sharing information may be in conflict with a statute.
When I see the word may, from someone pretending to be an expert, I know that there is an agenda in the background.
Just like an op Ed piece in the newspaper, when the word may pops into an argument from authority, that argument breaks down.
It’s insanity ! but I believe in karma, and those that are promoting this lunacy will eventually get sued by those that were indoctrinated into this cultism by the then adults, who had their childhood, and possibly their reproductive abilities stolen from them by because of this loony experiment. Joseph Mengele move over, make room for a woke Dr. Frankenstein !
I agree with Finnie
Patrick I do believe that you are on target. Fact is that Vermont has been slowly converting into a communist regime.
That fake pandemic shutdown is a great example. of how this RINO governor used state of emergency policy. that where set in place with no due process. behind closed doors. That have been found unconstitutional. in the highest courts in our country. As he solely appointed the head of the health department as his second in command. of the state of emergency shutdown. In that policy it appointed any governor. sole power of the whole state. that my fellow Vermonters is dictatorship. I will not get into the amount of damage. this governor and the health department head is responsible for. Simply because the list is far to long. Yet I will bring to light. that our youths where told that they must tell. the school’s staff what they did during their holiday season break. Again is so far outside of the laws it’s is in fact unlawful orders from tyrants. Overall Vermont has been mostly a democrat powered state yet it’s wasn’t a far left state as it is now. This tyrant standing in the roll of governor voted for Biden. I have personal contacts. with those in the hight offices. of this state, that have told me personally. things that blew my mind. I’m not at liberty to say or give names. Yet I will say that even the far left. are not going like what is coming next.
There are rumors that there are litter boxes. in the bathrooms of a school, here in Vermont. I’m doing research on this rumor. in hopes it’s not a fact. If it is a fact. my fellow Vermonters we must save our youths. by stop paying taxes, remove your children from public schools, demand that these sick people be removed from office. and any positions of power. those responsible for these kinds of behaviors. must be made into examples. of what happens when theres abuse our youths within our great state.
These kinds of unlawful orders, mandates, regulations, guidelines, rules, policies. have gone way to far stop obeying what is not laws. Start putting to action what is lawful and constitutional. We must restore law and order from within this state. We are the people. this is our state.these are our youths. we are responsible to protect them all.
Not the first time a bureaucrat hides behind an interpretation of existing law. That unfortunately requires litigation and litigation costs money. For all of us, as taxpayers to ‘defend’ the bureaucrat from the lawsuit to correct the faulty interpretation and for the litigant to challenge the misconstrued (perhaps intentionally) regulation.
I would add that there IS parental responsibility, when it suits the ‘state’.
To the wokesters I guess this seems good sport, as these people have no qualms about spending your money to prove their point.
Yes, the battle against woke goes on- not to be won or lost in the Randolph High School girls locker room.
At this point, if you choose to keep your kids in Vermont’s public school system, you are part of the problem. You’re a bad parent and you’re abusing your kids. Get them out before they give you a reason to regret your decision.
I would add for those that cant get their kids out of public school (there are many), get your but in. Thats why i ran and was elected to my local school board. But be ready to fight constantly. The DOE, AOE,teachers unions, national school board association, Vermont school board association are all in cahoots. But make no mistake, none of them are on the side of parents or families.
Thank you!
Many parents simply can’t afford private schools. Simple economics.
Engage in detailed conversations about the problems experienced in the P S system. Where there is a will there is a way. Most private schools are there to really help.
If true, this policy/regulation/law(?) Is stupid, obnoxious and should be opposed by all rational people. Parents not allowed to know their minor child’s information from educators is a travesty. Wake up, adults!
We all are responsible for this. by simply obeying rules, guidelines, regulations, policies, mandates that are unlawful orders from tyrants. anything that isnt laws. set in place by due process. is simply unlawful orders. and cannot be lawfully enforced. That detective nane and addrees is public information. must be exposed and fired immediately. Any laws set in place without due process are unlawful laws and should be exposed and taken to the highest courts to be removed.
Even Vermont Constitution has been slowly changed. Again without due process. We owe ourselves and more importantly our youths a great deal. We all must fight these tyrants stop allowing them to change what is the foundation of our democracy right here in Vermont first.
My fellow Vermonters we are in deep trouble. Have been for some time now.
Another sign that the Apocalypse is upon us. Parents do not have any rights regarding their children going down the long progressive road of sexual mutilation when they could be going thru a phase because it’s cool to be trans and one can watch the girls in their lockers.
. If The Agency of Education can make this declaration for public schools, it can make it for all schools in its jurisdiction, including public, independent, and home school authorization. This means its authority now expands into the home. And when the failure to provide privacy is deemed to be child abuse, Child Protective Services will be deployed to the home, by law, to intervene.
Buckle your seat belts, folks.
If you vote progressive, this is what you get. The dumbing down of America is in full swing now. As a parent you took on the responsibility of your children. Allowing them to be mistreated and indoctrinated is a failure on you. We used to not worry when we sent our little kids off to school, that has all changed. The mental health of children is declining as seen in the news.All shock value is increased, there no respect or manners and the drug ODs are telling us that something is very wrong. Children are supposed to be molded into adults by their families not the schools. Wake up and take these schools back from those who could destroy your children. Their jobs is to teach not indoctrinate.
It is past time that parents rise up and demand to know where laws are that restrain their rights to know about their own children and take steps to overturn them. The Department of Education should not have rights superceding their parental rights.
Solution: abolish the Department of Education.
I’m a teacher and I’ve had time to ponder that. I remember when standardization made sense to ensure quality education was happening in our schools. Now it is being used like a weapon to instill indoctrination.
Educators all know there are pendulums – first New Math is the rage so everyone rushes to embed it to show best practices. Then it’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) or is it now STEAM (to include Arts.) Maybe it is time for the pendulum to swing back and give local schools back their own reins. It would mean a major cut in educational finances in getting rid of so many layers of beuracracy. It is time for bright minds to consider alternatives.
While you’re at it, I’d love to see Big Picture education get some consideration. How many high school students would rather have 3 days of hands on job experience in a work environment of their choice instead of writing history papers, and English essays and science labs that may never be relevant to you. You stick with it for 3 months, and get to pick a new internship for the next quarter unless you decide you liked this setting so much you’ll stick with it.
The two days students are in school their teachers would instruct and assign them math, science, history lessons relevant to their internships. What if serious drama and art students could be plugged into these venues for more than an hour or two a week?
It’s great to see teachers coming alongside the students to open learning experiences that are relevant. It does wonders for the rebellious teen divides. Quarterly all the students give a report to their parents, peers, staff, community members on what they’ve been doing and that’s so much more relevant than giving a speech on an assigned topic that has little intrinsic significance.
There’s much more to this, but I’ve found students, parents and teachers see merit to this. Providence, Rhode Island, has been using it for about 20 years. A few Vermont schools have piloted it, too.
https://www.bigpicture.org/
I do not see how “they” make “this into that” (see below..below)
According to CDC information on FERPA, “The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law enacted in 1974 that protects the privacy of student education records. FERPA applies to any public or private elementary, secondary, or post-secondary school. It also applies to any state or local education agency that receives funds under an applicable program of the US Department of Education. The Act serves two primary purposes: It gives parents or eligible students more control over their educational records, and it prohibits educational institutions from disclosing “personally identifiable information in education records” without the written consent of an eligible student, or if the student is a minor, the student’s parents (20 U.S.C.S. § 1232g(b)).
to this?
“Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), only those school employees with a legitimate educational need should have access to a student’s records or the information contained within those records. Disclosing confidential student information to other employees, students, parents [italics added], or other third parties may violate privacy laws, including but not limited to FERPA. Transgender or gender nonconforming students have the ability, as do all students, to discuss and express their gender identity and gender expression openly and decide when, with whom, and how much of their private information to share with others.”
The operative word in the AOC version, is “may”, as in “may” violate. They did not say “does”. That’s how they can slip in the word “parents” and not be caught in an outright lie. However, it is still an attempt, a very good attempt, to mislead which makes the LIE all the more insidious.
Applying the wording of the actual FERPA, school officials would be in violation only after the student reached the age of majority.
What I find curious is that this issue never surfaced until gender became an issue.
Which leads me to conclude that there is a power play involved here to promote a specific agenda. The will of the people is not being served here, it is the will of an unelected elite.
All that’s missing here is the distribution of little red books to these children from these Maoists who occupy the education bureaucracy in Vermont. Who’s says Vermont hasn’t achieved it’s Orwellian world? More importantly, why do parents in Vermont put up with these attempts to hijack their children by the Statists?
Defund the schools. A sobering reminder. It’s been almost sixty one years since Russia’s Khrushchev delivered this.
Do you remember September 29, 1959?
THIS WAS HIS ENTIRE QUOTE:
“Your children’s children will live under communism, You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright; but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you will finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We will not have to fight you; We will so weaken your economy, until you will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.” “The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
Do you remember what Russia’s Khrushchev said in 1959?
Remember, socialism leads to Communism. So, how do you create a Socialistic State?
There are 8 levels of control; read the following recipe:
1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people.
2) Poverty – Increase the poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them.
3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect (food, housing, income) of their lives because that will make them fully dependent on the government.
6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to and take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion – Remove the belief in God from the Government and schools because the people need to believe in ONLY the government knowing what is best for the people.
😎 Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. Eliminate the middle class This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to tax the wealthy with the support of the poor
A perfect parallel to the Democrat agenda!!!!!
@ pigfarmer
Would you have a link to that ??
We should be aware that at this present time the populace is being groomed for a complete socialist takeover, a soft totalitarianism. As Krushchev said, we will fall like overripe fruit” into it. Very few among us, I suspect, have not taken a government hand-out at some point. We are being set up, groomed if you will, to depend on the government for everything. At this point 90% of government is unelected bureaucrats who are all but impossible to remove from authority. The only time we don’t like this situation is when it benefits others and not ourselves. The only way we can stop this, which I think will never happen, is to wean ourselves away from government help at all levels. We need to be more self-sufficient more resourceful, more resilient. Also we need to learn to love our neighbors. It is not love to let our neighbors fall into dependency. This will take grit and determination, which is rare to be found in this lazy and self-indulgent people. I do not say that I am immune to this, but I am aware, and fight against it.
I do not know what lawyers the Vermont AOE uses to inform the Agency of the American legal system, but said lawyers seem to be unaware of multiple legal rulings (see URL below), as well as the due process clause of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution that prohibits the government from depriving persons of basic liberties (in this case care and upbringing of children by parents).
https://chalkboardreview.com/whose-child-is-it-anyway/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&fbclid=IwAR2qEqjW0cOl39L_OmfkMC-lf4zVAQ9HPIaD9BHV1q0KW-kg7c3m4BpPOtI
“The Court still sided with parents. “Our jurisprudence historically has reflected Western civilization concepts of the family as a unit with broad parental authority over minor children,” Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote for the 6-3 majority. “The statist notion that governmental power should supersede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is REPUGNANT to American tradition,” he concluded.”
Public school educators and administrators would best serve students by focusing on quality education rather than creating their vision of an “enlightened society” where biology textbooks have been relegated to the trash bin of history.
Vermont is a beautiful State in terms of its environment, but in many other ways the State is BIZARRE. Many in leadership positions advocate for the absolute control of a woman over her body as regards pregnancy and abortion, BUT once the child is born and enters public school said child becomes the property of the School District? Seriously, who thinks this is logical????
Gerry thank you thank you again.
We need people like yourself on the front lines. people who are willing to put their neck on the line. Having enough courage and wisdom. We must continue to seek out like minded people organize and start damaging change. We need a state wide taxes boycott. The only way these tyrants will be stopped. is shutdown their support system. Legal actions against them we have no more time to waste here. They are going after our youths our future is at stake here. The focus is education not what adults do in their bedrooms. We must start with school boards and the removal of loud and proud teachers that take their private lives into our school systems. Be loud and proud at the gay Festival. not in our public schools system. where our youths are impressionable vulnerable and often far to obedient. We must organize. put to action at school boards meetings. lawful means to remove these people. who allows this kind of behavior. in our under age learning institutions. paid for by the taxpayers. STOP PAYING TAXES remove your children from public schools home school them. take your children to work with you. find anyways possible. if only for the short-term. while we all fight for the future of our youths. It doesn’t matter if we are Democrats Republican liberals or what have you. This woke movement isn’t about what most think it’s about. It’s about putt fourth a dictatorship by any means necessary. This woke joke isn’t a joke it is a Direct Hit on this country’s youths.
If people are not scared of losing democracy. in this country that’s because we already have.
“In Loco Parentis.” Latin for In Place of a Parent. Looks like the school districts are taking this as literally as possible as opposed to caring and being responsible for your child in YOUR ABSENCE ONLY.
This was never meant to usurp OR supersede parental rights but for the schools to be able, as one example, to make quick-acting decisions for emergency care on school grounds in light of potential time constraints. Removing genitalia or administering hormones was never a part of the equation.
Parents are ultimately responsible for their own minor children – NOT the school or school district.
The State of Vermont NEEDS TO SUED. So, again, I ask………Where are the attorneys and who is the claimant?
I urged for years to bring lawsuits. “Power doesn’t yield, except to demand.”
Maoists openly objects to the family unit.
The same school that wants parent permission to give your child an aspirin…..
Gosh, this Vermont War On The Family has gotten ugly!
The year of the Act was 1974 – Inflation, Watergate, energy crisis, upheaval in Israel. The plan never changed. They are going all in now because they have no choice. Hillary wasn’t supposed to lose, so they excellerate the plan to destroy the last bastion of freedom – the USA. People must stand and fight back with every fiber of their being. This is no dress rehearsal. This is war. Joe Biden said it himself, “for the SOUL of the nation.”
If your children don’t tell you they’re transgender or gender non-conforming, it’s not the school doing something wrong.
If the child isn’t telling you, perhaps they don’t feel safe and supported at home.
people can send their children to private or Christian schools! my husband and I have no children but we give to Christian schools so others can send their children. check it out. maybe in your area others do the same. a good way to keep children from being indoctrinated in wokeism
Since we pay taxes to the school regardless if you have a child there or not, I suggest –
1) If you have a child in Vermont public schools, get them out. Get them out FAST !
2) Since your property tax is going to the schools it’s time for parents to unite and take them to court. Regardless if you have a child registered there or not.
At the risk of loosing my conservative credentials maybe schools should focus on teaching kids rather than policeing every aspect of their behavior.
Education has suffered greatly in the days since the powers that be made schools more about “socialization” than education.
The judgment of schools and teachers should not outweigh parents’ judgment about the best interests of a child.
Whose Child Is It Anyway?
https://chalkboardreview.com/whose-child-is-it-anyway/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email