In the first days of the school year, teachers in many of Fairfax County’s classrooms distributed surveys to students that included questions regarding gender identity and preferred pronouns. The district’s superintendent, Michelle Reid, has stated that she is defying Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R-VA) model policies for public education, which require that schools notify parents of such discussions. Fairfax County’s unwillingness to follow state law means that parents will not have a right to know about these survey answers or their children’s social gender transitions at school.

After hearing from a number of families in multiple Fairfax County schools about these surveys, I emailed my sons’ middle school and high school principals for information. As per the parental rights outlined in the federal Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment , I requested blank copies of the surveys administered to my sons on their first two days of school. Under the PPRA, any schools receiving federal funding must provide parents with curricula upon request and offer them the ability to opt-out their children from invasive surveys. Given that I was never offered an opt-out for surveys containing sensitive information, such as gender identity, I wanted to at least exercise my right to review the questions their teachers asked them.

In what was likely a coordinated effort based on guidance from the Fairfax County School Board, or the regional assistant superintendent, both principals punted my request to the district’s Freedom of Information Act office. This is simply the district’s way of bureaucratically bullying parents. The PPRA exists so that parents can access information directly from their children’s schools and not be forced to pay $280 for it from the district’s FOIA office, as they have forced me to do in the past. This form of bullying is how Fairfax County Public Schools handle parents who ask questions.

Given the district’s predisposition to bullying inquisitive parents, I wonder how teachers and administrators will deal with students who answer survey questions in “unsatisfactory” ways. Many students across the district, some who are completely fed up with the gender identity and pronoun circus, shared their answers with me. One student’s submitted pronouns were nor/mal. Another student identified as a moth, and several students identified as Apache helicopters.

In this minefield, I am wondering if the district’s administrators will provide our little Apache helicopters with oil instead of water during the day. Or, alternatively, if school administrators will charge these students with bias incidents and hate speech, which under the recent changes to the code of conduct require a reeducation training session with the district’s equity officer, since identifying as an Apache helicopter is apparently malicious .

Predicting the response is difficult. Last year, in my son’s first week of middle school classes, I grew frustrated with all the gender surveys and the lack of anything academic. I sarcastically posed a question to the principal about why the school did not offer its students the option of it/its for their pronoun choices. After all, certain people can identify as dogs , and many are happy to affirm that identity, and it is only fair to be completely inclusive, right? She answered seriously that “other” is offered as an option and that “it/its” could be considered for the following academic years. Nothing like objectifying our children by calling them it/its.

Rather than getting distracted by the gender ideology circus now infiltrating our schools, Virginia’s public school administrators would do a great service for our children if they followed the law and abided by Youngkin’s model policies. Doing so would make these surveys irrelevant and give parents confidence that their children’s schools are spending their time on academic rigor instead of debating whether or not our children can identify as dogs or Apache helicopters.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and a member of the Independent Women’s Network.