A Christian couple is suing the Rockford, Michigan, Public School District, alleging that teachers secretly used a different name and male pronouns for their autistic daughter.
Dan and Jennifer Mead’s lawsuit — filed by Alliance Defending Freedom on Monday — alleges that staff at East Rockford Middle School began referring to their 13-year-old daughter with male pronouns and a masculine name beginning in the fall of 2022. Earlier that year, the girl, referred to as G.M. in court documents, met with a school counselor and allegedly said she identified as a boy.
“The Meads were stunned when they discovered that the District had—without seeking their consent and while actively concealing information from them—begun to treat G.M. as a boy, referring to her with male pronouns and a masculine name at school,” the lawsuit says.
“As directed by the District’s policy, District employees—employees the Meads had trusted with sensitive information about G.M.’s mental health—deliberately changed G.M.’s school records to conceal the fact that the District was treating their daughter as a boy without their knowledge,” the complaint added.
Rockford, a city of around 6,000 people just north of Grand Rapids, is a relatively conservative area, but according to ADF, the school district went along with the radical gender theories pushed by many on the Left, violating the Meads’ “sincerely held religious beliefs and parental rights.” G.M.’s transition to identifying as a boy allegedly began after she was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (without intellectual or language impairment), Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder in January of 2022, according to the lawsuit.
Then in May of 2022, Erin Cole, one of the school’s counselors, allegedly received a message from G.M. on the school’s computer program that allows students to communicate with school employees. The alleged message read, “Hi Could you email my teachers and tell them to call me F[]?” — a common male name, the lawsuit states. For the next few weeks until the end of the school year, Cole allegedly communicated with Jennifer Mead multiple times, but never brought up her daughter’s request to change her name.
The Meads said they only discovered the school was using male pronouns and a different name for their daughter after one school employee forgot to remove the new name and masculine pronouns from G.M.’s records. After the Meads found out how the school was referring to their daughter, the school staff member attempted to go back and remove the masculine pronouns from G.M.’s record, according to the lawsuit.
After finding out that the school went along with G.M.’s name and pronoun change, the Meads withdrew their daughter from the school district and began homeschooling her, alleging that the Rockford Public School District’s “constitutional violations destroyed [their] trust in the counselors, administrators, and other District employees with whom they had shared intimate details about G.M.’s and their lives.”
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“Parents, not the government, have the right to direct the upbringing, education, and health care of their children,” ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson said in a statement. “Schools should never deliberately hide vital information from parents, yet that’s exactly what the Rockford Public School District did.”
Rockford Public School District Superintendent Steven Matthews said earlier this week that the district still had not read through the legal documents “completely,” according to WOOD-TV.
“We respect the privacy of this family and as such have no comment at this time,” Matthews said. “Our staff continue to support all students and their families as we work together to help our students learn and grow.”