A Colorado school district has knowingly and repeatedly assigned children to bunk with members of the opposite sex on overnight trips, according to a lawsuit first obtained by The Daily Wire.
Jefferson County School District’s “Transgender Students” policy requires that all students on overnight visits are to be roomed by their gender identity, rather than their actual sex. The district shared this policy with transgender-identifying students and chaperones, but not with students or their parents.
The three families suing the district on behalf of their children — Joseph and Serena Wailes, Bret and Susanne Roller, and Robert and Jade Perlman — did not learn about the policies until their children found themselves rooming with students and chaperones of the opposite gender on trips, the lawsuit states.
In one instance, the district assigned an 11-year-old girl to a bunk with a trans-identifying boy. In another, it placed a trans-identifying 18-year-old female student— who only a week earlier had identified as female — in a cabin with 11 and 12-year-old boys, where she allegedly supervised their changing and showering, according to the lawsuit.
In both instances, students were uncomfortable with the rooming situation. The 11-year-old girl contacted her mother, who was also chaperoning the trip, and pulled her daughter from the room. Many of the boys under the care of the 18-year-old student, who were at a remote location without cell phones, resorted to changing in their sleeping bags and refused to shower for the duration of their trip.
The parents are asking a Colorado district court to “make clear that JeffCo can’t violate the rights of parents or students.”
They allege that after their children were placed in inappropriate situations without their knowledge, their requests to remove their children from said situations were ignored, as the district prioritized accommodating the students who identified as transgender.
“JeffCo violated parents’ fundamental rights by refusing to give them truthful, pertinent information about their children’s overnight accommodations, thus frustrating their ability to make informed decisions about their children’s education and related matters,” says the lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a Colorado district court. “This constitutional violation also threatens the children’s right to bodily privacy, which is implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”
“All parents should be concerned when information is hidden from them,” Joe Wailes told The Daily Wire. “We love our school and the people who work there, but no school district should have a policy that overrides parental rights and puts children’s privacy and safety at risk.”
“We want all children to be comfortable when sleeping overnight on school-sponsored trips,” he added. “We are grateful that the other parents are standing with us and hope more parents will stand up against these bad policies and ensure parents’ rights are protected.”
The Wailes, Rollers, and Perlmans are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, an American Christian legal group that has fought some of the most high-profile religious liberty cases in the United States.
“JeffCo has doubled down on their policy and made it clear that they will ignore concerns from parents and continue hiding information from parents about who their children will share rooms with,” Kate Anderson, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Wire. “We are asking JeffCo to let parents be the ones to make decisions on their children’s privacy while protecting the privacy of all children.”
What follows are the three families’ accounts of what happened to their children and classmates. Jefferson County School District did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire.
The Wailes
Joe and Serena Wailes allege that when they allowed their 11-year-old daughter to go on a district-sponsored trip to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., they had been told that their daughter would be rooming with other girls in her grade.
Their daughter is identified as “D.W.” in the lawsuit to protect her privacy.
“It wasn’t until their daughter, D.W., was in her room getting ready for bed on the first night of the trip that she found out she was to share a bed with a boy who identified as a girl,” the lawsuit says.
Joe and Serena Wailes / ADF
D.W. discovered that her bedmate was a trans-identifying boy as the children sat on their bed showing each other the screensavers on their phones, according to the lawsuit. D.W. did not normally have a phone in her possession, but her parents had given her a phone to use for the week.
When her bedmate showed her his phone background, showing a pride flag, and revealed that he was actually a boy who identified as a girl, “D.W. was shocked.”
“It quickly dawned on her that she was about to share a bed with a boy,” the lawsuit states. The 11-year-old had enjoyed spending the day with the student but objected to sharing her intimate private spaces, or engaging in “intimate activities” like undressing, in front of a boy.
D.W. snuck into the bathroom to call her mother and quietly shared what was going on, according to the complaint. The lawsuit notes that the bathroom did not lock, and only had a frosted glass door.
“With a quiver in her hushed voice, D.W. told her mom that her bedmate was a boy.”
Fortunately, Serena Wailes had also gone on the school trip. She told her daughter to meet her in the lobby and then informed a teacher on the trip about the problem. That teacher then informed D.W.’s principal.
Serena Wailes and her daughter spent the rest of the evening trying to explain to school officials that while D.W. liked the male student, it made her uncomfortable to share a room with him.
Chaperones “seemed unsure of how to handle the situation,” and at first tried to merely switch D.W.’s bed, but leave her in the same room as the boy. Ultimately her mother convinced the chaperones to move the boy to a different room, but throughout the evening, “JeffCO employees always prioritized the male student’s privacy and feelings over D.W.’s.”
Joe Wailes was two time zones away from his wife and daughter, only able to text and call them as they dealt with the matter.
“He could not fathom that the district had put his little girl in this position, especially without informing him,” the complaint says.
Eventually, the Wailes learned about the district’s “Transgender Students” policy, and sounded the alarm on the matter in December. The Daily Signal first reported that the family was calling on JeffCo to clarify whether it would continue its practice of “intentionally withholding information about rooming accommodations from parents.”
The Rollers
The Wailes’ experience was not an isolated incident, according to the lawsuit.
Bret and Susanne Roller similarly allege that the district “lied” to them about where and how their son, identified as B.R., would be housed on an annual sixth-grade camping trip built into the sixth-grade science program called Outdoor Lab.
Sixth graders are typically 11 or 12 years old.
The Rollers were told that there would be three male high school counselors and one male college counselor on the trip. They were horrified to later find out that their son had actually been under the supervision of an 18-year-old female counselor who identified as a male.
“It wasn’t until B.R. was in the mountains, away from home for the first time, and with no form of communication, that he realized JeffCo had lied,” the lawsuit says. “One of his high school counselors — one that had been ‘female-identifying’ the week before — was not male but was a ‘male-identifying’ girl. B.R. soon found out that this girl was not just sleeping and changing in the same cabin but was also tasked by JeffCo to supervise the boy’s showers, including his.”
Parents are not allowed to attend, chaperone, or even visit while Outdoor Lab is taking place, and children cannot call their parents, according to the lawsuit. Outdoor Lab’s website notes that there is no cell service at the campsites.
Counselors stay in cabins with the students, and “JeffCo instructs counselors to oversee the sixth graders whenever they are in the cabins, including when they sleep, change their clothes, and shower,” the complaint states.
Bret and Susanne Roller / ADF
Outdoor Lab’s campuses have communal bathrooms, where the junior and senior counselors stand outside the showers to make sure the students are abiding by the shower time limits.
JeffCo reportedly informs the high school students who apply to be camp counselors that the district’s policy rooms students by gender identity rather than biological sex. But the district does not tell parents this information, the lawsuit alleges.
So when Susanne Roller picked up her son from his December 2022 Outdoor Lab trip, the first thing he told her was, “I had a girl in my cabin.”
He then revealed to his mother that his high school counselor was an 18-year-old female student, a Jefferson County high school senior whom the Roller family knew already through their 4H Club. According to the complaint, the student would change her gender identity from female to nonbinary as she pleased.
Her presence made the boys in B.R.’s cabin “very uncomfortable,” according to the lawsuit
“Many boys changed while lying down inside their sleeping bags to avoid changing in front of a female student who was seven years older than they were.”
B.R. also told his mother that the female high schooler supervised the boys’ showers with only a thin fabric curtain to provide them privacy.
“The eighteen-year-old female counselor was instructed by JeffCo to stand outside the shower stalls as the eleven and twelve-year-old boys entered and exited the shower stalls to ensure they didn’t stay in the shower too long,” the complaint states.
Many of the boys were so uncomfortable with this situation that they “decided together to refuse to shower during their entire stay at Outdoor Lab because they were too embarrassed and scared to shower in front of a female.”
“We were so excited for our son to experience Outdoor Lab and make incredible memories, but his trip is now only remembered by how uncomfortable he felt when an 18-year-old female counselor, claiming to be ‘non-binary,’ stayed in his all-male cabin,” Susanne Roller told The Daily Wire.
“No sixth grader or any child should have to face these situations alone all while parents are left in the dark and unable to make the best decisions for their own children,” she added.
The Roller family eventually discovered the district’s “Transgender Students” policy, and realized that this policy meant that their children could again be placed in this situation.
Outdoor Lab’s principals, Ryan Bazz and Robert Gneiser, did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Wire.
The Perlmans
A third family, the Perlmans, are joining the lawsuit out of concerns that their own children could soon be left at the mercy of JeffCo’s “Transgender Students” policy.
Their son is supposed to attend Outdoor Lab soon, the lawsuit says, and their daughter plays basketball on the school district’s teams.
“The Perlmans are concerned about where their daughter will sleep while on JeffCo athletic trips,” the complaint says. “But they don’t want their children to miss out on academic and extracurricular activities, especially those that provide educational benefit and could help them secure college scholarships, simply because JeffCo cannot assure their children’s privacy on school-sponsored trips.”
The Perlmans reportedly cannot move their children out of the district, so they have “become very involved parents, attending every parent meeting and asking questions to ensure they are comfortable with their children’s accommodations on overnight trips.”
One of their sons plans to attend an Outdoor Lab trip in November. His parents very much want him to attend, but unless the district “reassures him and his parents that he will not be roomed with a student, counselor, or intern of the opposite sex,” his parents are afraid to send him on the trip.
“To date, JeffCo has made clear that it will not accommodate any non-transgender student in the District who is uncomfortable rooming with a student of the opposite sex or give any assurances to parents that their children will only be roomed with children of the same sex,” the complaint states.
Jefferson County school district has come under fire in the past for its left-wing policies and actions of its faculty. Over the summer, the district released a statement acknowledging a Facebook post made by one of the district’s elementary school teachers expressing regret that the would-be assassin of former president Donald Trump “missed.”
In October 2022, one month after the district denied that students were dressing up as “furries” at school, CBS News Colorado reported that school officials were, in fact, aware that dozens of parents had emailed about children dressing up as furries, according to emails reported by the publication.
