Posted on 07/13/2017 10:15:42 AM PDT by Petrosius
TORONTO, July 13, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — Campaign Life Coalition is raising the alarm that parental rights are under new attack, this time by school boards defending transgenderism and gender confusion in students of any age behind their parents’ back.
A number of Ontario school boards have quietly implemented directives that a school not tell parents when a child asks to “transition” to another gender at school, even in kindergarten, Jack Fonseca, senior political strategist for Campaign Life, told LifeSiteNews.
“So you can have a five-year-old boy or seven-year-old girl asking a teacher about switching genders, or that they want to be another gender, and the board says that teacher can’t tell the parents,” he said.
“What a tyrannical violation of parental rights! Worse still, it amounts to institutional child abuse on the part of schools.”
Children are “already subjected to gender identity theory in schools at too young an age, which can actually cause them to believe they might be transgender by producing sexual confusion that didn’t exist before,” he noted.
“These policies will leave young kids without the protection of their parents against gender theory ideologues,” added Fonseca.
“The harm to a child could be irreparable, including increased risk for depression and suicide.”
Board: Teachers “shall not” tell parents
At least five Ontario public school boards have policies or procedures accommodating transgender students that explicitly direct the school not to tell parents a child has “transitioned” to another gender at school, without the child’s express permission.
These are: Toronto District School Board; Thames Valley District School Board; Greater Essex County District School Board; Upper Grand District School Board (504-C), and Waterloo Region District School Board.
The WRDSB's March 2017 administrative procedure states:
Some students who identify as transgender are not openly so at home because of safety and/or other reasons. A school shall not disclose a student’s gender status to the student’s parent(s)/guardian(s) without the student’s explicit prior consent (emphasis added). The other boards’ directives follow the Waterloo policy almost verbatim, but substitute “should never disclose” for “shall not.”These directives, except for the WRDSB and TVDSB, add: “This is true regardless of the age of the student.”
The TDSB policy further states:
"There is no age limit on making an accommodation request, and young students have the same rights to privacy and to have accommodations made on their behalf with or without their guardians' knowledge” (emphasis added).An elementary school teacher who spoke to LifeSiteNews on the condition of anonymity confirmed her board’s parental non-disclosure directive applies from kindergarten to Grade 12.
“We could be talking about a six-year-old here,” the educator told LifeSiteNews.
“Even if it’s a 14- or 15-year-old, the parent has the right to know what is happening with their child!”
Board: We honor child’s direction
But Peter Rubenschuh, assistant superintendent for equity for Waterloo Region District School Board, said his board’s procedure is about safety and honouring a child’s choice.
"Gender identity is certainly something that we certainly take at presenting value and that we honour,” he told LifeSiteNews.
Rubenschuh denied the board acts on the presumption that telling the parents will put the child at risk, but defended the policy for that reason.
"I mean, the reality is that we also have many lived experiences of students who identify or become public with their gender identity, and are subsequently dismissed from the home,” he said.
Rubenschuh said his board’s procedure applies from kindergarten to Grade 12.
“The student will identify publicly when they’re ready to do so and we honour that.”
But Campaign Life’s Fonseca isn’t buying it.
He dismissed the board’s stated safety concerns as “fear-mongering,” adding: “This excuse doesn’t pass the sniff test. It doesn’t sound at all like what real parents would do, who overwhelmingly love their children.”
Fonseca believes the underlying motive behind the school boards’ directive to exclude parents is to “indoctrinate the next generation with state ideology.”
That ideology, he contends, includes inculcating children from an early age in a view of human sexuality completely at odds with traditional morality.
Indeed, the Liberal sex-ed curriculum, rolled out in 2015, entrenches gender ideology as fact, teaching children by the Grade 8 there are six genders rather than two biological sexes.
Board assumes transitioning in child’s “best interest”
The teacher who spoke to LifeSiteNews concurred her board claimed safety as the reason for its procedure, but the document “clearly follows the agenda of pushing kids through this transitioning.”
The “major assumption is that transitioning is in the child’s best interest, and I don’t agree,” the teacher said.
“My sense with my colleagues is that there is concern with what they perceive as going behind parents’ backs, although the directive is very clear that we’re being told not to,” she added.
“And that the reason is it’s in the child’s best interest not to.”
She says she would rather be free to work with families, or refer them as a unit to community supports.
“By maintaining secrecy, the school boards are underscoring the shame that the child may already be feeling. Assisting a child to open up the dialogue with their parents empowers the child,” she told LifeSiteNews.
“With the support of caring school staff, children can begin the conversation that needs to happen with their parents.”
Policies puts children at greater risk
Indeed, when it comes to safety, the teacher says excluding parents is what will put the child at risk.
"It’s so important to acknowledge that the parents are the primary and most significant source of support for a child,” she said. “If there is a concern with a child, the teacher should be talking to the parents.”
A student “questioning his/her gender is a child in serious emotional pain, a child at significant heightened risk of suicide, depression, self-harm, drug use, etc,” the teacher said.
Parents kept in the dark will be “unable to be on their guard for these risk factors.”
Not to mention the “emotional fatigue and trauma of a child who is living two lives — at school presenting one gender, at home another” or the “confusion of a parent who knows something ‘isn't right’ but can’t get to the bottom of it and hits endless brick walls in talking to their child and/or the school.”
Boards’ directives against the law
And by directing non-disclosure to parents, boards are actually asking teachers to “do an unlawful and unconstitutional act,” according to lawyer Geoff Cauchi.
Parents have a number of common law custodial rights that have been “elevated to constitutional rights” by various court decisions since the 1982 Charter came into force, he told LifeSiteNews.
These include directing and controlling the education and medical treatment of their dependent children.
The “accepted rationale” for recognizing these rights is that it’s “irrational and fundamentally unfair” for the state to impede parents’ ability to do what it legally obliges them to do, he said.
“Whoever has the responsibility must also have the power.”
And under the Family Law Act, Ontario parents have the legal duty to support their children up to age 18, or age 16, if the child then voluntarily withdraws from the home.
So a school board’s “authority over a child has been delegated to them by the child’s parents” according to common law, Cauchi said.
As the parent’s agent, the school and the teachers have a “legal duty” to tell parents all they “reasonably” need to know to meet their support obligations “even if the child says he or she does not want the parent to be told,” he said.
A child “has no general right to privacy as between himself or herself and the custodial parent.”
Do kids belong to parents ...
Ontario school boards also have no “statutory mandate” to assess a child’s capacity to give “valid and informed instruction to withhold information from the parent,” nor do teachers have any “legal status or expertise” to assess this, Cauchi noted.
If a school board has “reasonable grounds to believe that a child is ‘in need of protection’ under the provisions of the Child and Family Services Act,” its legal options are limited, he said.
It must either refer the matter to the local Children’s Aid Society, or “somehow” get a court order allowing it “to withhold the information from the custodial parent.”
Ontario law requires CAS decisions be supervised by the court and parents allowed to challenge those decisions in court.
“Indeed, to sum up, a state agent is legally bound to go to court and prove you’re an unfit parent before it can intervene in this way,” Cauchi told LifeSiteNews.
“In the absence of a court order, that means state agents can’t unilaterally agree to be complicit in the dependent child’s efforts to keep secrets from his or her custodial parent.”
The teacher who spoke with LifeSiteNews agrees.
"When there is a concern about a child, we talk with the child’s home about what is happening. If we are concerned that doing so would impact the child’s safety, then we talk to the Children’s Aid Society. Those are the two options.”
Or do they belong to the state ...
WRDSB’s Rubenschuh disagrees.
“I don’t understand,” he said, when LifeSiteNews observed parents need to know what’s happening with their children at school.
“Under what premise would we offer that information if we know it’s going to create a vulnerability for that child?” he said.
“The student will give us the direction when they are comfortable and ready to disclose,” Rubenschuh added.
“I would argue that this is ideology,” countered Cauchi.
“Their attitude is that the children belong to the state and they don’t belong to the parents. In a free democratic society, that doesn’t happen.”
But given that Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government is pushing the LGBTQ agenda and gender ideology in schools, it’s likely such parental non-disclosure directives will increase.
Pro-LGBTQ laws trump parental rights?
Indeed, Rubenschuh says there are “probably a dozen” boards with similar directives.
Some were put in place shortly after the Ontario Human Rights Code added “gender identity and expression” as prohibited grounds for discrimination in 2012.
And Ontario’s Bill 13, or Accepting Schools Act, passed in 2012, mandates that “schools ultimately have the duty to provide a safe and secure environment for students,” Rubenschuh said.
Cauchi says the policies should be fought in court.
“It has to be challenged,” he told LifeSiteNews.
"The education authorities are ignoring the fact that until the child reaches the age of 16, the parents have legal custody of their children.”
Most important, parents “need to be aware that their rights have been rolled back,” the teacher told LifeSiteNews.
“Every parent has to be thinking seriously about their own child and whether public school is a good fit for them, especially if the child is at risk.”
Call to defend parental rights
Campaign Life's Fonseca was even more dire.
“Don’t believe these Marxist educrats give a damn about child safety. They don’t,” he said. “Their real goal is to eradicate the Judeo-Christian worldview from society, and children are merely collateral damage in their war.”
And “like Goebbels and Stalin, they understand the key to indoctrinating the next generation in the state’s ideology is to get them young, using state-run schools.”
Indeed, in response, Campaign Life has launched a petition to defend parental rights, he said.
It asks school trustees to “repeal or oppose this tyrannical breach of parents’ rights, lest they invite a mass exodus from the public education system.”
Moreover, “like all evil policies, this one will spread like a cancer to all provinces and territories until it engulfs every school board,” warned Fonseca.
For this reason, he’s urging all concerned Canadians to sign the petition, which can be found here.
Canada needs a revolution. Canada needs to cleansed of all its far left nonsense.
A precursor to the coming UN policy on “children’s rights”.
Parent’s rights end at the exit door of the hospital.
Just say it already: we’re taking your kids from you. Complain at your own risk.
I just don’t want us to be the drain if the left is cleaned out of Canada.
I don’t remember anyone being gender confused when I was growing up.
We’re gonna need another wall
We had one in my class. Effeminate boy who went on to die of AIDS by the time he was 30.
No matter how bad those clowns are it can always be worse
Did you think you had parental rights? NOOOO. You must pay the bills, keep them fed and healthy, but the state owns their bodies, and you are their slave. The state can turn them gay, or chop off their organs, or kill their babies, and you can do nothing except pay the bills.
Not in this lifetime.
The silent majority has had it.
I was roped into watching the show JAZZ on the eliptical the other night, you cannot turn off this TV or change the channel.
Now Jazz parents are well off, sure the guy worked for it, but Jazz seems so umcomfortable in her own body.
She has two brothers about her age and they work out together...sickness.......xo
Freegards......
You MUST not let them corrupt your sons and daughters! You wouldn't choose a perv as a babysitter, why as a schoolteacher? --- and if they implement this at the school, they are pervs, pushers, or, as they say, "allies" of perversion.
Educate your precious children at home. If that's not "legal", move to where it is. We will defend you in Tennessee.
Well, now if I were the president of this land
You know, I'd declare total war on The Pusher man
I'd cut him if he stands, and I'd shoot him if he'd run
Yes I'd kill him with my Bible and my razor and my gun
God damn The Pusher
God damn The Pusher
I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man
Steppenwolf
We’re going to have to invade and conquer Canada eventually. After we win the bloody war against the Progressive city-states.
To: Petrosius
I don’t remember anyone being gender confused when I was growing up.
++++++±+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
When my some was 4, he wanted to be Spiderman. He put his red underwear on over his pants, used a towel as a cape, and tried to jump off of everything he could climb. That phase lasted about 2 years. Then he wanted to be a dukes of hazard boy. From there HW wanted to be a stunt man which lasted till his early teens when he was in a head-on collision on his school bus. He decided being a stuntman was too risky, scary, and painful.
My girls wanted to be called by their step sister’s name because their step dad obviously thought highly of her, and they wanted to be her.
The point is, kids go through stages of identity experiments as they grow up to discover who they are. I wouldn’t have dreamed of sending my 4 year old to a plastic surgeon to change him into Spiderman, because he wasn’t Spiderman despite his very active imagination! Neither did I go to court to change my daughter’s names. They had to learn their own individual value and worth, and those things take time. It’s part of growing up.
Kids often want to be the thing that they find most impressive to gain approval and a sense of self. SSO if schools are impressing baby minds that being gay or transgender is the coolest thing they can be, then of course kids are going to tune into that!
And then, to make a child think he/she can’t turn to parents for help with the most concerning things in their lives, to marginalize and deminish parental worth in the eyes of a child is the most cruel thing anybody can do to a child! You might as well tell children that their parents don’t love them for who they are. That’s devastating to a child!
I fought that with my own kids in school with the planned parenthood/birth control/abortion issue. I won. My kids won. They were able to protect their own kids from the dangerous influence of the public education system. Thank God.
The REAL agenda is to sever the influence of parents on children at the earliest age possible in order to train minds for the future. Once kids become adults, those changes become nearly impossible.
The only other alternative is the Laos the parents. Boomers know what that means. If you don’t, learn what happened there after the Vietnam war.
These agendas are planned out years in advance, broken down into steps and stages..goals and objectives..and are thusly implemented by the various government controlled agencies, and enforced by such.
It will get worse.
They were not known as gender-confused. They were known as kids being kids. I'd say over 99% did just fine with it if their parents didn't freak.
Or more to the point, if the adults in their lives didn't smilingly and slimily encourage them to explore deviant gender/sex/sexuality "options".
I’ve decided that I’m a double-trangendered semi-lesbian.
I’m a man who thinks he’s a woman who thinks she’s a man. Both identities like sex with women.
I’m presently working on my pronoun, and all of you must use it or else face the wrath of Todd
So when the kid leaves the house and rebuckles his knickerbockers below the knee*, the parents are not to know?
Seriously, would a parent not know that a child had a gender identity problem, while the school administration would?
*”Trouble”, from The Music Man.
"Since I am PAYING for my child to be educated, I demand that I be told about every detail of his education and behavior while in your custody. If you don't like it, don't take my money."
Oh holy hell.
The child’s sensations are genuine. The primitive binary thinking that if you don’t “feel” male, you need to immediately change to a female
IS DAMN STUPID!!!!
Why let stupidity run your school district????
Let boys be boys whether they feel girlish or not. They are boys. Apparently with so many uteri filled with plastics, we are going to keep having children with gender brain dysfunction. Let’s be more scientific AND loving about it by calling all males male, but allowing males to live how they wish. And vice versa.
And let’s clean up our environment so we can prevent total breakdown of our neurological and reproductive systems. Right now, people are applying lotion. LOTION is neurotoxic and no one even understands. People think it’s benign and softens your skin. That list of unpronounceable ingredients goes right into your blood and your brain. No one even knows this. That is just one tiny product among thousands in the onslaught our bodies face daily.
Love the kids, don’t deform them, and let’s work on preventing these dysfunctions.
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