A Davenport parent asked the Bettendorf School Board to consider her daughter when thinking about district policies for transgender students. The district recently reinforced transgender policies with staff regarding use of facilities and preferred names and pronouns for transgender students.
Parents who are concerned about the safety and well-being of the other children expressed their feelings during Thursday night’s board meeting.
“I understand this is a federal and government law and everything, but when my daughter is scared that she’s going to be in the bathroom and per se, a boy comes in because he says today he’s a boy, she no longer wants to go to the bathroom at school,” the parent said. “So, is she supposed to come to your facility for the whole day and then not go to the restroom and then get sick because she hasn’t gone to the restroom because she doesn’t feel safe?
“To me it’s not acceptable. If you have to adhere and you have to make rules to these people that are doing whatever they want to do, there shoudl be some kind of another restroom for those people to utilize, that way all students will feel safe.”
She asked what if someone is in the restroom and they don’t agree with transgenderism and a boy who is a girl gets beat up in the boys’ bathroom.
The mother said schools need to start teaching values again.
“When this here (the Bible) left your schools, all the crazy starts,” she said. “We need the Bible back in our schools. We need values back in our schools and we need to be teaching them.”
While it is important for kids to learn to love kids who are different from them, the mom said it doesn’t give the board the right to teach kids they have more power than others.
“That doesn’t give you guys the right to teach them that they have more power than my child or any other child in the school. We all need to be individualized. We all need to feel welcomed, valued and successful and my kid needs to come to school to learn an education, not indoctrination. And I would appreciate if we could all start at that and stop all of this woke-ism.”
