The policy changes recommended by the Virginia School Boards Association saw coordinated protests from right-wing groups like Stand Up Virginia this summer. Protestors reportedly called the inclusion policies “an outright abomination” that are “confusing young, innocent minds” and urged residents to “stand up against the evil.”
The controversy has already made it to the Virginia Supreme Court this year. A school district in Loudoun County came under fire from LGBTQ+ advocates this summer after reinstating a teacher who spoke out against a trans inclusive policy. Byron “Tanner” Cross, a gym teacher at Leesburg Elementary School, was put on paid administrative leave after vocally opposing a proposal that would require faculty to refer to students by their correct names and pronouns at a school board meeting.
The Virginia Supreme Court ultimately ruled in August that his first amendment rights had been violated, and Cross was reinstated.
Enrolling students at schools like Smith Mountain Lake is one way of sidestepping the trans-inclusive policies, as religious institutions do not have to adhere to these standards and can teach faith-based lessons. One teacher at the campus recently used “God’s assigned genders” to explain the concept of gendered nouns in the Spanish language, according to the Times.
Jeff Keaton, founder of the Virginia-based evangelical group RenewaNation, told the Times that Christian parents would continue seeking out alternative learning environments as backlash to LGBTQ+ inclusion grows. He compared the surge in enrollment to “the second Great Awakening in Christian education in the United States since the 1960s and ’70s.”
The prior “Great Awakening” was motivated by white Southern parents who founded segregated private schools in response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, as the Times notes.
Retaliation against trans inclusion isn’t the only factor motivating the growth of Christian schools, however. The boom is also in response to the conservative backlash against COVID-era mask mandates and “Critical Race Theory” (CRT), the latter of which Republicans have alleged is being taught in K-12 schools. CRT is an academic movement that examines the intersections of race and law in the United States.
While many have noted these courses are pretty much exclusively taught to college students, Republican lawmakers across the country have introduced dozens of bills this year seeking to ban racial-justice-focused education. These states include Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, and South Dakota, and bans on CRT have been signed into law in Arkansas, Idaho, and Oklahoma, according to Newsweek.
In Texas, teachers have been asked by right-wing groups to report if they are asked to teach CRT or adhere to “gender fluidity policies.”
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