When former Ludlow, Massachusetts, teacher Bonnie Manchester was told by school administrators to call a female student by “his new gender name” and not to mention that to the child’s parents, that was the last straw.
“I did what any teacher would and should do: I told the parents,” Manchester told The Epoch Times.
The child was just 11 at the time, and as Manchester learned, the school was not only meeting secretly with the girl, but also in private with her 12-year-old brother regarding his purported interest in regendering as a girl.
Manchester, who had been a social studies teacher at the district’s Baird Middle School, was fired for telling the children’s parents about the school’s clandestine activity. Principal Stacy Monette called Manchester’s “conduct unbecoming a teacher,” referring to her “inappropriate communications with the parents of a student.”
“You shared sensitive confidential information about a student’s expressed gender identity against the wishes of the students,” Monette wrote in an April 16, 2021, letter terminating Manchester.
Monette, who was named the state’s Middle School Principal of the Year by the Massachusetts School Administrators Association in 2020, and other school administrators didn’t respond to requests for comment by press time.
It’s one of what appears to be a growing number of similar cases cropping up across the United States.
On Jan. 31, parents in Jacksonville, Florida, filed a federal lawsuit against their 12-year daughter’s school for having secret meetings with her to encourage her to identify as a boy, after she began expressing gender confusion at school. The parents found out only after the child tried to commit suicide by attempting to hang herself in a school bathroom.
Last week, a Salinas, California, parent filed a notice of intent to file a lawsuit against the Buena Vista Middle School for allegedly allowing two teachers “to secretly brainwash her teenage daughter into identifying as bisexual, and later as transgender.”
A week earlier in Texas, an anonymous teacher outed her school to a digital media outlet by releasing documents from the district’s training programs that show that teachers were being told to keep parents in the dark about any disclosures their children make at school about gender identity feelings.
“DO NOT contact their parents and out them to their families,” the documents advise.
