Being a father of 4 and grandfather of 9 parental rights is a topic near and dear to me and which is why some of my posts, such as the one below *** are from Alberta Parents Union.

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Including parents in their children’s education is not only the right thing to do, it’s also common sense.

And, it is popular!

So popular, in fact, that quite a few school board candidates in quite a few school districts beat incumbents at the last school board elections by promising to include parents more.

Parental involvement is also now being debated provincially, with Bill 27 proposing to require schools to disclose to parents if their children are using a name or pronouns different from those supplied by the parents.

Now, you probably wouldn’t know it from the media attention this issue has received, but this policy is actually the status quo at many school divisions across Alberta.

Many of those school trustees who got elected on involving parents more in their children’s education followed through on that promise and implemented similar these policies at the school board level.

And, contrary to the gloom and doom predictions of the opposition to Bill 27, there has been no crisis of hostility between parents and their children or parents and schools in the school divisions where this has been adopted.

Quite the opposite, in fact, as research and common sense show that parents trust schools more when schools give parents more information.

Unfortunately, Bill 27 is still necessary, because the majority of school divisions, including the largest ones with the most students, have not yet adopted common sense disclosure policies.

All four school divisions in the big cities, and some others that foolishly follow their lead, prohibit disclosure of names or pronouns to parents and remove any discretion from teachers and principals to do so.

Worse, they do this through broad policies that prohibit the disclosure of any information that could be related to a child’s gender identity.

That’s an incredibly broad definition and, combined with a lack of discretion being allowed, has led to some truly absurd policy results that (almost) no one must have intended.

For example, in one case, a 14-year-old boy was taken off school premises in a private vehicle to the home of an adult “facilitator” who was not a staff member of the school and did not have children attending the school.

In another, a 13-year-old girl was taken from a rural school to a Calgary hotel for a conference on “diversity, equality, and human rights”, where she was taught how to perform sex acts.

Again, all without their parents knowing anything about any of this.

At a similar conference, a 13-year-old boy was given 153 condoms, a giant spaceship in the shape of a male body part that encouraged him to “explore”, and a 50-page flip book that depicted sexual relations, and was told his mother would never know he missed most of his classes to attend.

He was not told anything about sexually transmitted infections - rather, his mother had to deliver that information, when she first learned of the excursion, by finding the illicit materials in his room.

How is this possible?

Well, one reason is that parents - and grandparents, educators, and taxpayers who support the parents’ role - do not pay enough attention to school board elections.

These are policies adopted by school boards who have been captured by an ideology, despite the ideology being widely believed to be nonsense by the electorate.