A teacher at a high school in southern Illinois kept parents in the dark about students participating in an LGBT club, according to emails between school teachers.
A teacher at Red Bud High School purposely excluded parents from knowledge about a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) Club by calling it “Bubbles” and not inviting parents to Google meetings about the club, emails obtained by Parents Defending Education and shared with The Daily Wire show.
While no longer with the district, the teacher’s actions show how educators across the country will often push to hide information about sexuality and gender from parents.
“This is all a part of the dangerous trend of parental exclusion policies that we have seen take root in school districts across the country. These misguided school officials want to exploit their positions to influence children to hide information from their parents. Parents are the ones who maintain the right to raise their children and should not tolerate schools that want to shut them out of the process,” Michele Exner, a senior advisor for Parents Defending Education, said in a statement.
Red Bud Community Unit School District 132 Superintendent Jonathan Tallman told The Daily Wire that the teacher’s actions had been a violation of district policy, adding that the district would never support hiding any information from parents about school clubs or any school activity.
On August 31, 2022, a teacher at Red Bud replied to an email from a teacher at Waterloo High School in Illinois asking about what platforms the GSA club should use in the context of some students being concerned about their parents “having access” to information about the club. GSA networks are backed by Left-leaning groups and nonprofits like the Transgender Law Center and the Ford Foundation.
“I talked about setting up a ‘class’ in Google Classroom because that’s what all of the teachers here are required to use, but some of the kids were worried about their parents having access,” the sponsor of Waterloo’s GSA “Diversity Club” wrote to a group of GSA Illinois advisors. “What platforms do you use for club communication?”
In response, the former Red Bud teacher explained how parents could be kept out of the loop.
“We use google classroom. I don’t invite parents though. In the beginning we named it something that did not identify the group, but the kids knew what it was. ‘Bubbles’ was what they came up with. Kind of random, but they all knew,” the teacher wrote. “Good problem to have though, are you getting an increase in allies or students that identify as LGBTQ? We really need more allies in our group.”
Tallman told The Daily Wire that the teacher who wrote that email left the district at the end of the 2022-2023 school year and that the GSA club was no longer active in the district. He also said that at some point during the club’s existence, it was no longer referred to by the code word “Bubbles.”
“This district does not support, whatsoever, keeping anything from our parents,” Tallman told The Daily Wire. “It’s not going to happen here.”
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In another email, a sixth-grade teacher with “she/her” pronouns at Dorris Intermediate School in the Collinsville Community Unity School District 10 in Illinois replied to the Waterloo teacher’s question.
“We use ClassTag. And load the kids ‘guardian’ with their e-mail or cell number. It is a website/app platform that messages and texts too,” the teacher and yearbook coordinator wrote.
Collinsville Community Unit School District 10 superintendent Brad Skertich told The Daily Wire that Dorris Intermediate has never had a GSA club and that the employee was just “sharing how they communicate with parents/families throughout the school year.” He also said that parents at the school were made aware of any club that their children participate in.
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