Seven of eight Alaska school districts admitted in response to a challenge from Parents Defending Education that the state’s school board association encourages schools to hide kids’ gender “transitions” from parents in a PJ Media exclusive.

When Parents Defending Education (PDE) challenged eight Alaska school districts on their secretive transgender policies, the districts all cited the primarily state-funded — i.e., taxpayer-funded — Association of Alaska School Boards (AASB). AASB has put that money to ill use, it would seem, as seven of the school districts admitted that their policy of hiding kids’ transgenderism from parents came to them from AASB policy.

Erika Sanzi, the Director of Outreach for Parents Defending Education, told PJ Media, “These school districts are deliberately withholding information from parents about their own children. Any school that participates in or facilitates the gender transition of a child in their care is engaged in a psychosocial intervention and to cut parents out of that process is unethical and likely illegal.”

The Alaska school districts in question, all of which have a policy of withholding knowledge of “transgender” identification from parents if the parents don’t approve of LGBTQ ideology, are Hoonah City, Pribilof, Bristol Bay Borough, Yakutat, Sitka, Wrangell, Northwest Arctic Borough, and Juneau. Not all of those school districts’ policies are identical, but they all have an exception for withholding knowledge of a student’s gender “transition” from parents in certain circumstances.

All of these school districts except for Bristol Bay Borough admitted to PDE in response to public records requests that they received their transgender policy from AASB, as the links above show. Hoonah City district, for instance, told PDE, “We use AASB for our policy revisions and manuals.” 

Multiple districts returned relatively short replies. Juneau’s district was more detailed in its response, though:

The Juneau School District (JSD) subscribes to the statewide Association of Alaska School Boards (AASB) statewide policy service … AASB provides legally vetted, and expertly reviewed policy updates for Boards to consider and adopt. This service prevents each district from having to legally vet each of their policies on their own … the language in the AASB AR was originally adapted from Anchorage School District’s Guidelines for Working with Transgender Students and Employees.

Anchorage’s policy states that schools should withhold information from parents “if the family does not support the student’s desire to transition.” It's amazing how 18-year-olds aren’t considered mature enough to drink, but young schoolchildren are considered capable of deciding to masquerade as the opposite sex without parental consent.

Here is another example of these AASB-sourced policies, from the Juneau School District: “When contacting the parent or guardian of a transgender student, school staff should use the student's legal name and the pronoun corresponding to the student's gender assigned at birth, unless the student has specified otherwise.”

According to a 2023 legislative priorities document available from the Alaskan government, AASB receives 64% of its education funding for Base Student Allocation from the state, with yet more taxpayer cash coming from federal and local governments. (AASB, by the way, was demanding yet more government funding.) Thus parents would seem to be paying taxes for the privilege of having their children gender transitioned without their knowledge.

Perhaps this is not surprising, however, as Alaska’s attorney general declared last year that parents had to agree to “gender identity” content for kids in school. It seems that taxpayer-funded Alaskan officials and educators are so passionately dedicated to transgender ideology that they are willing to violate parental rights and hurry youth into a lifetime of regret.