A school district in rural Ohio mandated that new teachers learn the definition of terms like “pansexual,” and assert that they would hide information from parents about their children’s sexual orientation, according to training materials obtained by The Daily Wire.
The training, which took place at St. Marys City Schools earlier this year, told instructors to use students “preferred pronouns” to make sure they didn’t “trivialize a student’s identity.” It also forced them to properly match so-called “gender identities” with their definitions, pushing teachers to master terms such as “questioning,” “asexual,” “same-gender loving,” “queer,” “pansexual,” “agender,” “nonbinary,” “pangender,” “transgender,” “cisgender,” and “bigender.”
If you didn’t correctly match terms with their definition, or failed to agree with assertions such as that “school personnel do have the right to disclose a student’s sexual orientation to her/his parents,” you were not able to advance through the training.
After the contents of the training were raised to the school by The Daily Wire, the school superintendent said it was unaware of what was included and would no longer offer it.
”I see what the training says and that’s not our philosophy, and we don’t agree with that,” Bill Ruane, the superintendent, told The Daily Wire. He said that the training had been administered by mistake as the district had switched to a new provider for state-mandated bullying training and the module given to the new hires was supposed to be on bullying, not gender ideology.
The discarded trainings show how far-Left ideologies can creep into schools, even in the most conservative areas of the country. The area is about as conservative as it gets, with over 75% of voters in precincts surrounding the school voting for former president Donald Trump in 2020. The district is represented by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who has been invited to speak at the school and likewise said the training had no place in his home district.
“This training doesn’t represent the values of St. Marys School System and community,” Russell Dye, a spokesman for Jordan, told The Daily Wire in response for comment on the training.
Ruane said they had managed to keep radical leftist views out of the school, which allows teachers to be armed to protect students, and has always backed parental rights in education. He also said the district has supported bills that would keep males out of women’s sports and bathrooms.
He said that the training was only administered because of a switch from SafeSchools to Public School Works, both electronic systems that facilitate state-mandated health and safety training. The same kinds of trainings from SafeSchools were supposed to be transferred over to Public School Works, but Ruane said that a module called “LGBTQI+ Students” meant to be on bullying made it into the training shown to new hires.
During one part of the training from Public School Works, teachers are told not to go to parents with information about their children’s “sexual orientation.”
“When an educator learns of a significant issue affecting a student, the standard response is to notify the student’s parents/guardians. However, for issues involving a student’s sexual orientation, you must carefully consider what information is appropriate to share,” the training says.
It says that teachers should first look at district policy and that it would be “wise” to “consult with a building administrator” or a “mental-health professional” before speaking with parents.
Elsewhere in the training, teachers were forced to mark “false,” for the statement: “Generally speaking, school personnel do have the right to disclose a student’s sexual orientation to her/his parents.”
Instead, according to the training, “Generally speaking, absent a very compelling reason to do so, school personnel do not have the right to disclose a student’s sexual orientation to anyone without her/his permission.”
A similar question said that school faculty could not tell “anyone” about a “child’s gender identity,” but in the classroom they should do whatever a student prefers.
“By using a child’s preferred name and pronoun (e.g. he/him, she/her, they/them, xe/xem, ze/zem, etc.) you promote their safety and well-being,” the training says. “As previously stated, LGBTQI+ terminology is continually evolving. The same holds true for pronouns. Again, remaining open-minded and respectful is the best course of action.”
Teachers are also pushed to accept the provided definitions of politically charged words like homophobia and heterosexism, which is defined as the “belief that heterosexuality is the only ‘natural’ sexuality and is superior to other sexual orientations. Heterosexism denies, ignores, denigrates and/or stigmatizes non-heterosexual forms of emotional and affectional expression and sexual behavior.”
According to the training, gender is not “the biological distinction between males and females” but “the concept of masculinity or femininity.”
Ruane told The Daily Wire that the district has never supported any of the policies promoted by the training and said that if an employee had told him what was in the training he would have immediately pulled it. He added that trainings are normally vetted but this one slipped through because of the switch over in providers.
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It is unclear how many districts use Public School Works, but the Ohio-based education company encourages the celebration of “Pride” in the classroom.
A blog post from the company encourages school districts to celebrate “Pride” and set up Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs, which have been criticized by parental groups who say the clubs serve to indoctrinate students into gender ideology. The post also said districts should adopt “supportive” policies for LGBT identifying kids and teach staff how to address the “unique needs of transgender and gender diverse students.”
A catalog available online from one of Public School Works trainings include information on “gender transitioning, including social transitioning and medical transitioning via puberty suppressors, hormone therapy and/or gender‐affirming surgeries; schools as partners in the gender‐transitioning process.”
Teachers across the country have come under fire for promoting LGBT content to children without parental knowledge and in some cases have been accused of secretly socially “transitioning” kids.