CV NEWS FEED // During a field trip, a pro-“trans” Colorado school assigned the 11-year-old daughter of Joe and Serena Wailes to sleep in the same bed as a boy who said he was a girl.
The trip reportedly took place in the cities of Washington D.C. and Philadelphia – 1,500 miles away from the school. Two other girls were assigned to sleep in the room’s other bed. The Waileses are practicing Christians and have since sought representation from the pro-parents’ rights legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
“In the summer of 2023, on a cross-country overnight trip, Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) assigned a fifth-grade girl to sleep in the same bed with a fifth-grade boy who identifies as transgender without notifying the girl or her parents,” wrote ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson in a letter to the Jefferson County school board and superintendent:
The girl only found out because the boy who identifies as transgender told her on the first night of the trip. It then took the girl and her parents multiple requests to get her moved to another room.
And even then, chaperones told the girl to lie about the reason for her move because of the district’s overnight rooming policy—a policy that violates parental rights and student privacy by rooming students based on gender identity while hiding that information from other parents and students.
“Every child should be treated with respect and privacy,” Anderson continued. “But that respect and privacy must extend equally to all students.”
“JCPS’s overnight rooming policy does the opposite,” she pointed out. “JCPS’s policy states that ‘students who are transgender should be assigned to share overnight accommodations with other students that share the student’s gender identity [sic] consistently asserted at school.’”
“However, the policy says nothing about a girl being required to share a bed with a boy who identifies as transgender,” added Anderson. “This policy and practice violates the sincerely held religious beliefs of our clients and their children, the parental rights of them and other parents in your district, and the privacy rights of all students.”
“Throughout the entire evening, [the boy’s] privacy and feelings were always the primary concern of JCPS employees,” Anderson wrote later in her letter:
After JCPS disregarded [the girl’s] privacy and the Waileses’ parental rights, JCPS then silenced [the girl], thus infringing on her freedom of speech, when a JCPS teacher told the three girls that they were not allowed to tell anyone that [the boy] was transgender, even though [he] voluntarily chose to share this information.
The Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan confirmed that while Serena Wailes went on the field trip with her daughter, she was not listed as a chaperone.
The mother said that leading up to the trip she was “definitely not aware” that her daughter was assigned to room with a boy.
Upon finding out, the young girl “snuck into the bathroom and called her mother,” Olohan noted. “Then she went downstairs and met her mom in the lobby to discuss the matter.”
Serena Wailes said that her 11-year-old was “terrified and really upset about the idea of sharing a bed with a biological boy.”
“I was really upset that she was put in that situation at 11 years old,” Wailes added in an interview with The Daily Signal.
“We were not even given the information that this was a possibility before the trip,” she continued:
The whole time they’re saying, ‘Girls on one floor, boys on another, they’re not going to be in each other’s rooms unless it is pre-approved.’ So we’re going through this whole process, not even recognizing that this is a possibility.
Joe Wailes, who was home at the time, said he felt “a bit helpless” during the ordeal.
“It was a frustrating experience, and I just really felt like it was not a situation my daughter should be put in,” he said.
According to FOX News, the same school district’s pro-“trans” policies also “had a methodical system in place to keep parents in the dark on their child’s gender transition in schools.”
