On behalf of the Wailes, Roller, and Perlman families, Alliance Defending Freedom filed a federal lawsuit this week against Jefferson County Public Schools. The lawsuit is Wailes v. Jefferson County Public Schools.
The enormous school district, which oversees approximately 81,000 students in 166 schools, covers communities and suburbs west of Denver.
Mallory Sleight, an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, tells AFN the lawsuit came only after ADF has approached JCPS in the past about the policy and asked school officials to address it.
“But, unfortunately,” she says, “they were not willing to work with us on this policy which really left us no option but to file a lawsuit."
In a statement to AFN, JCPS said the school district disagrees “with a number of claims” in the lawsuit after reviewing it. The school district is looking forward to a court hearing to share the “true facts” about the “reasonable accommodations” it offers families and students.
“Families always have the ultimate choice whether their student participates in any unique programming that involves overnight accommodations,” the school district further stated.
In the lawsuit, ADF attorneys allege the JCPS policy about “overnight accommodations” is deceptive even though it states girls room with girls and boys room with boys. The reason it is deceptive, ADF says, is because “boy” and “girl” depends on the student’s own definition of their “gender identity.”
The parents represented by ADF say they have evidence of a deceitful policy, beginning with the Wailes family. On a school trip to Washington, D.C., where students shared a bed with a second child, the family’s 11-year-old girl realized she was climbing into bed with a boy who identifies as a girl.
After the incident occurred last year, the Wailes family contacted ADF seeking legal help.
Bret and Susanne Roller shared a similar – but more extreme – situation with ADF. Their child, an 11-year-old boy, participated in the Outdoor Lab education program at JCPC. On a three-night stay in the Rocky Mountains, their son and other boys learned their cabin counselor, 18, is a female. Expecting to be led by a male counselor, the boys learned their counselor identifies as “nonbinary,” meaning she claims to be neither male nor female.
The female counselor slept in the same cabin, and changed clothes, and even supervised their showers, the outraged parents allege.
The third family in the lawsuit, the Perlmans, joined as plaintiffs over concerns for their own children: a daughter active in sports and a son who plans to participate in Outdoor Lab this year.
Beyond the upcoming courtroom fight, which could drag out for months, Sleight says parents are demanding answers right now from the school district after they reviewed the accommodation policy online.
That policy has since been taken down from a school counselor's page, the ADF attorney alleges, but the policy remains unchanged.
