SC anti-transgender bill could require schools to notify parents of kids name, gender changes

An amendment to the bill that would prohibit minors from receiving gender transition procedures would require public school administrators to notify a minor’s parent or legal guardian of non-derivative name changes, pronoun titles not aligned with a minor’s sex or confirming their gender is “inconsistent with his or her sex.”

Teachers, public school employee advocates and some lawmakers, however, have major concerns.

H. 4624, dubbed as the “Help not Harm” bill, has sparked widespread criticism from the medical community, parents, teachers, public school employees and others. The bill would prohibit anyone under 18 from receiving gender transition surgery or using puberty blockers for transitioning.

A Senate amendment would require a principal, vice principal or counselor to immediately notify a minor’s parent or legal guardian if the minor’s gender is inconsistent with his or her sex, requests a school employee to address the minor by a name other than the minor’s legal name or if a minor uses a pronoun or title that doesn’t align with the minors sex.

A version of this amendment requiring parental notification was shot down in the House after multiple people, including one of the bill’s sponsors, Majority Leader Rep. Davey Hiott, R-Pickens, spoke against it.

“I’ll never apologize for standing up for our school teachers,” Hiott said Jan. 17, when the House passed the bill, but voted against the amendment. “This amendment’s important to me. At the end of the day, you’re putting extra work on our public school teachers. My teachers back in Pickens County are great people. They make our community roll. They’re teaching our young people. We’re not teaching our young people.”

The amendment was altered and added back in Senate Medical Affairs committee to require counselors, principals and vice principals alert parents.

The concern from educators stems from public school employees already having a number of responsibilities, and the added pressure to intervene in personal matters can be burdensome.

Patrick Kelley, teacher and lobbyist, said, under the proposed amendment, in theory, a teacher would have to report to an administrator or a counselor any of the three things identified in the amendment and then the principal or counselor would have to contact the parents, so teachers still would have unnecessary involvement.

Kelly said one of the most discouraging aspects of the amendment is the requirement for a principal or counselor to call home if a child requests to go by a nickname that is not a derivative of their name.

“I’ve taught for 19 years, I’m pretty sure every year I’ve had at least one student that is using a non-derivative nickname. Under this bill, the principal’s got to call home every year for that student at the start of the year. That is a waste of the principal’s time, that’s a waste of the parents’ time.”

The amendment was debated in the Senate on Wednesday afternoon, where Sen. Mike Fanning, D-Fairfield, said the section could create some “heartburn” for educators.

Fanning said as a former teacher, “bubba,” “precious,” “booger,” “skeeter,” “mullet,” “drumstick,” “pudding,” and more were nicknames that his students had him call them in school.

“I’m being serious,” Fanning said. “One fourth of the students that I have taught and in schools that I have been in use names that are not their names.”

Sen. Richard Cash, R-Anderson, who is in favor or the bill, said students should be called by their names, and that parents usually wanted that anyway.

Kelley said schools are going to have to err on the side of caution to ensure they are in compliance with the law. Because the language in the bill is vague, it will create even more paperwork and unnecessary confusion, he added.

“At the start of the year, we’ve got 100,000 things going on to make sure that kids are safe and that they are set up for academic success during the year. We wonder in this state why we have an educator shortage, yeah, it’s some big picture, big ticket items like salaries and like testing and like class size, but it’s also the proverbial 1,000 paper cuts from these one more things that we layer on top of teachers and administrators. We just don’t need this.”

Sherry East, President of the South Carolina Education Association, said the organization is concerned about multiple aspects of the bill, one of which is the perception that public school employees are “hiding” secrets from parents. They are already mandatory reporters, she added.

Another concern is the potential danger that could come to children. East said if a child was outed to their parents and they were kicked out, sent away to camps, physically harmed or even committed suicide, the root would have started from the administrators or teachers actions, which is another weight they shouldn’t have to deal with.

“What would that do? We don’t want to go down that road,” East said. “We don’t know what would happen if you misdiagnosed a child and then they were abused. We’re really taught to stay away from those kinds of things. We definitely oppose that part of the bill.”

East added that medical decisions should be between the child, parents and doctors, not the state. She said it was ironic that a majority of the members of a party that wants less government intervention were the ones pushing for the bill in the first place.

“Every person, students and employees, deserve a safe place to go to school and work. And these attacks on the LGBT community are unwarranted and unnecessary. And we really need to focus on things that really matter in South Carolina such as academics, and get the culture wars out of our classroom.”

If the bill passes as written, it would have to be sent back to the House for approval, since the Senate made changes in committee. If the House disagrees with these changes, the bill will head to conference.