Parental rights policy causes confusion, backlash in Laramie County school district

CHEYENNE — As the 2024-25 school year began, teachers across Laramie County School District 1 had a new lesson to add to their first day agenda: How to comply with the district’s new parental rights policy.

Specifically, teachers had to explain to students the new rule that requires teachers to report students’ preferred names to their parents.

School districts across the state were mandated by the Wyoming Legislature to pass a parental rights policy outlining the situations in which the schools are required to notify parents about changes with their children.

LCSD1’s policy not only requires staff to notify parents of educational, medical and disciplinary changes involving their student; they also are required to notify parents should their student ask to go by a name other than what’s on their registration.

“We shared the policy with all of our students on the first day of school,” said one teacher, who was granted anonymity by the Wyoming Tribune Eagle because she fears retribution.

“And there were some kids that had to think a bit about how they were going to introduce themselves, and then either chose to introduce themselves as what was in the grade book or not knowing that their parents would be called. That hesitation you saw immediately with kids introducing themselves on the first day. It didn’t have a very welcoming effect.”

The teacher continued that some students had previously disclosed to trusted staff their preferred name, and this year, when their parents were informed of that, the child was denied the right to go by their preferred name.

The teacher told the WTE that it didn’t feel right having to choose between going against the students’ wishes and the parents’ wishes, especially knowing how demeaning that can be for a student.

Several teachers have discovered that the only option to avoid hurting either party and not going against the policy or the parents is to refer to the student as “buddy,” “pal,” “friend” or some other gender-neutral identifier, or even gesture to students to address them, rather than saying anything at all.

“This name (policy) really feels a lot more like higher stakes to me, because the safety of children that I care about feels more on the line now,” the teacher told the WTE.

Mental health a concern

The teacher noted that most parents accept their kids for who they are, but the parents who don’t often have kids who may need school to be a safe place.

“I really worry about the mental health of the students that are members of the trans community,” the teacher told the WTE. “We know that they are already at very high suicide risk; we learn about that in our trainings that we do every year. … Obviously, that’s the most extreme thing, but it is still the worst day of your life if you lose a student. So of course, that’s the top of mind. And then attendance is already difficult with high school students, and so if we’re making school a less welcoming place, I worry that they won’t come to school, they won’t complete their diploma.”

This teacher’s fear of students killing themselves, leaving school or being kicked out of their homes is not unsubstantiated.

According to the Trevor Project, in a 2022 mental health survey, 46% of LGBTQ youth experienced violence due to their sexual or gender identity, 10% reported being threatened with conversion therapy, and 10% were subjected to conversion therapy.

While advocates of the policy focused heavily on nicknames, rather than gender identity, when pushing for this policy, the policy does impact queer students, Wyoming Equality Executive Director Sarah Burlingame said.

“I think their intention was to disproportionately impact queer kids,” Burlingame said. “Regardless of what they said, it was clear that that was what the intention was. There is not a cohort of the differently nicknamed who are (saying), ‘Please help us, school board; help us, legislators; the differently nicknamed are needing direction here.’ That’s nonsense, and we can just name it for what it is.”

Burlingame noted that, as a parent, she has observed a lot of confusion, through the experience of her own children, in this new era of parental rights.

“Every single class has given (my kids) a different metric for how they’re supposed to (comply with the policy),” Burlingame said. “My children feel sorry for their teachers. … They have all of these things that need to be done, and (the administration) just added one more thing, and the kids can tell that it’s contrived.”

Teachers under pressure

Some teachers in the district noted that they have observed a chilling effect since the policy was put in place. It makes students hesitant to even ask questions about what this policy means in practice, they said.

“I have not heard any students directly talk about the name policy, because I see in them, I think, the same tension and fears that the adults in the building feel,” another teacher who was granted anonymity told the WTE.

According to this teacher, students are avoiding the topic not only because it may make people feel uncomfortable, but also potentially because they don’t want to face the reality of the situation or get others in trouble.

“We’ve got good kids. They don’t want to put anybody in a bad spot, and I think we all understand that this is not something anyone signed up for,” the teacher told the WTE. “But I do think that they are also just avoiding the reality of the situation, sort of just watching what they say.”

One teacher noted that schools in the district seem to be holding their breath, waiting for which will be the first to be sued over the policy.

“I think that (our administration) is a great team. I think that they want to do the right thing,” they told the WTE. “But the legal concern for them is more important than maybe an individual student here or there. (They are) sort of asking someone to ‘suck it up’ for a little while, just until we figure out how it plays out.”

‘Nobody wanted to listen’

Advocates for the policy say that the intent was never to isolate queer students but rather to ensure parents are informed.

Moms for Liberty Laramie County Chair Patricia McCoy is a parent in the district who advocated consistently for this policy and the addition of the name change rule.

“If a child can’t change their name legally, why should the school be allowing them to change their name without parental consent?” McCoy told the WTE.

McCoy and many of her peers who wanted this policy were motivated, in part, by an incident in Rock Springs in which parents sued the district over not disclosing information regarding the social transition of their child.

“We all saw what happened in Rock Springs. We do have a Moms for Liberty chapter in Sweetwater County that is helping those parents,” McCoy said. “They lost custody of their daughter because they did not immediately affirm her new belief; that’s a huge violation of the parental rights right there.”

McCoy personally pushed for the addition of the name change rule because of her and her daughter’s experience with gender identity in LCSD1. She told the WTE that while she appreciates the current administration and staff, when her daughter was in high school, the administration looked different.

According to McCoy, a series of speech-and-debate pieces and social influences that didn’t align with their family values led to her daughter briefly identifying as a boy, which she blamed on the school at the time. Her daughter currently identifies as a girl.

“Not only did they give her a new name without even saying anything to us, they’re giving her (speech) pieces that we disagree with. We told them that and were asking them to work with us on this,” McCoy said. “Nobody wanted to listen. Nobody tried to help. Even after she tried to take her life, no one wanted to listen to me, except for the local Moms for Liberty chapter. That’s how I joined them, because they were the only people that listened to me.”

According to McCoy, her daughter still has LGBTQ+ friends; she just no longer identifies as a boy — a change that came after the pandemic hit and children were sent home, rather than to school.

“She still has many friends in the queer community, but she herself is not,” McCoy told the WTE. “That’s another thing I tried to tell her at 14. You can love them, you can accept them, you could be their best friend. It doesn’t mean you have to believe the same thing that they do.”

This fear of losing a relationship with a child has motivated many parents to reach out to McCoy. She has been an advocate for many of the more controversial policies regarding parental rights, book access and book procurement that the district has addressed this year.

“A lot of parents in our county and in our district feel the same way,” McCoy said. “They feel like they’re not being heard. They feel like they’re struggling to get the schools to let them be active participants in their children’s education.”

“The Board voted to approve the amended version of the Parental Rights Policy, which was required by a statute passed in the last legislative session,” LCSD1 Board of Trustees Chairman Tim Bolin wrote in a statement. “The amendment requiring parent permission to change the name a student is referred to by school staff was designed to protect parents’ right to know about what is happening with their child at school.”

While McCoy says the intention isn’t to hurt queer kids, and Bolin says the intent is to protect parental rights, Burlingame points to queer kids being harmed after being outed to parents.

“It’s really important to keep that at the front of your mind when you think, ‘Why wouldn’t you call some parents?’” Burlingame said. “Because they will kick them out of their homes, because they will beat them, because we had a 12-year-old child in Evansville who was stabbed by his father and went to school the next day and had to tell a counselor, ‘My dad stabbed me because he thinks I’m gay.’”

Burlingame added that, of course, any reasonable parent wants to be informed about their child. She would like to be informed about the big things in her children’s lives, as well, but she said this policy is a blunt way to address a sensitive subject with very little room for nuance.

Only 20% of LGBTQ+ students in Wyoming feel strong support from their families regarding their identity, according to the Trevor Project. Queer youth are much more likely to feel supported by friends in Wyoming, with 70% reporting feeling high levels of support from friends in 2022.

Both advocates and opponents of the policy find that the wording and implementation can be confusing for teachers, staff and students.

According to the district, a teacher is to refer to the student’s name as it appears in Infinite Campus unless the parent provides permission for the records clerk to add it into the nickname field.

If a student’s name is simply a common derivative or shortening of the student’s legal name, parental permission to use the name is not required. Examples could include Katie for Katherine or Mike for Michael.

The policy does not specify whether action should be taken if there’s an association with gender in a common derivative. For example, the nickname “Alex” could be short for Alexandra or Alexander and is often viewed as gender- neutral.

Teachers also have to think of children’s names outside of how they will be addressed in class.

According to one teacher, they are expected to report new names, even if they simply overhear students addressing each other by preferred names.

They described a situation in which a teacher was offering a compliment to a student, using their preferred name because the teacher did not have access to Infinite Campus and had simply been calling the student by their common name. Even though they were unaware of the name on file, the teacher was quickly alerted to the fact that the new policy prohibited them from using the student’s preferred name without parental permission.

“That is exactly the situation we’re trying to avoid,” the teacher said. “The students are allowed to say whatever they want to say, as long as it’s not calling someone a name that would be bullying or, for instance, like, if that’s the name they want to be called by their friends, they can totally do it. But we, as staff members, need to report it if we hear it.”

How to address confusion

Different stakeholders have different views on how to address this confusion. For those opposed to the policy, it was overly complicated from the beginning, and advocates of the policy weren’t being honest about what they really wanted.

“We’re Wyomingites, we have an established culture that works very well for us,” Burlingame said. “It’s a live-and-let-live culture that says, ‘What name am I going to call you? The name that you’ve asked me to call you.’ It’s not more complicated than that.”

For McCoy and proponents of the policy, the step to less confusion is clearer rules.

“That’s one thing I keep saying is we need a clear, structured policy that says this is what you can and cannot do, and here’s what happens if you don’t have it,” McCoy said. “The teachers need to have a clear expectation of, ‘What’s gonna happen to me if I don’t follow (policy)?’ Teachers shouldn’t be left hanging. They shouldn’t be in limbo saying, ‘Do I do this? Do I do that?’”

While only a semester into the year, clear impacts of this policy are emerging, and for longtime residents like Burlingame, it brings up the issue of how Wyomingites are presenting their beliefs as these policies get passed.

“It feels like there’s a lot of conversations that we’re having now where people are pretending to be about one thing,” Burlingame said. “But if you really believe it, if you’re really convicted about it, just say it like that. It used to be a virtue of Wyoming that we were very plain spoken, sometimes to offense, but you could just count on it. Somebody would just say, ‘No, I don’t like that.’ And this sort of like sophistry and obfuscation. It’s bad policy, and it breeds a bad culture.”

McCoy told the WTE that, from her perspective, people are often confused when they accuse Moms for Liberty of being homophobic or hating teachers because of the policies they have supported.

She cited their work locally collecting teacher supplies and “Gays Against Groomers” in Colorado, a group that is “fighting back from inside the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children happening under the guise of ‘LGBTQIA+,’” according to their website, as an example of supporting those communities.

But for Burlingame, this policy doesn’t support queer kids.

According to a 30-year longitudinal study done by the Family Acceptance Project, acknowledging and affirming, or even just acknowledging queer identities lowers rates of self-harming behaviors, drug and alcohol abuse and suicidality.

“They don’t want queer kids to feel safe and comfortable in schools,” Burlingame said. “They don’t want them to be acknowledged. They don’t want their identities to be affirmed.

“If you’re in the business of educating children, that’s what you should care about,” she said. “And we know that those are correlated. We know that they are causal, and they don’t care because they don’t care about all children. They care about their dogma.”