Montgomery County Public Schools resumed processing religious exemptions from LGBTQ lessons as the semester began Tuesday, in accordance with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that sided with Christian and Muslim parents.

To comply with the June ruling, Maryland’s largest school system has provided an online opt-out form for parents of its roughly 160,000 students to cite “sincerely held religious beliefs” for excluding their children from the state’s mandatory K-12 gender identity and sexual orientation instruction.

The district has also pledged to give parents advance updates on what will be taught and when, reversing a policy of hiding the lessons and ignoring parental complaints before the high court’s intervention.

District spokeswoman Liliana López said its central office will process the requests to give parents time to object to any math, science, English or social studies text.

“Upon approval, the student’s school will be notified, and an alternative assignment will be provided,” Ms. López told The Washington Times.

“By centralizing the approval process, MCPS aims to make this as easy as possible for families, providing greater access and reducing the need for direct school-level coordination,” she added.

As of Monday afternoon, the school system had not received any requests.

The Montgomery County Education Association, a union that opposes making teachers process the exemptions, declined to comment.

Wael Elkoshairi, a Muslim father who addressed the Supreme Court and led parental opposition to mandatory LGBTQ instruction, expressed mixed feelings about the opt-out in a Tuesday morning phone call.

“We’re happy with the outcome and optimistic, but we don’t fully trust Montgomery County Public Schools based on how we’ve been treated the past two years,” said Mr. Elkoshairi, a lifelong county resident who pulled his third-grade daughter out of the system. “It will take time to heal some wounds after the draconian way it was handled.”

The Montgomery County Board of Education launched an “inclusivity” reading program in fall 2022 to celebrate pronouns, pride parades and gender transitioning for students in pre-K through fifth grade.

Initially, the district gave parents advance notice and said they could opt their children out of the instruction. But in March 2023, officials abruptly shifted course, claiming that the growing number of requests had become unworkable.

That led a group of Muslim, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish parents to challenge the lack of notice and opt-out. They argued in a lawsuit that the school system infringed on their religious freedom to teach sexuality to their children according to their beliefs.

While lower courts sided with the district, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling concluded that officials imposed an “unconstitutional burden” on parents practicing their faith and ordered officials to restore the exemptions.

It remains unclear how many exemptions the district has received, as officials have never provided a number.

According to Mr. Elkoshairi, just 14 families out of 178 in his daughter’s former grade school requested an opt-out in 2023, undermining the district’s claims.

He said the school was reading a highly sexualized book called “Pride Puppy” — about a parade with drag queens in leather and underwear — to preschoolers at the time.

“We unapologetically believe marriage is between a man and a woman,” Mr. Elkoshairi added. “Everyone has a right to think as they like, but we don’t send our children to public grade schools to be indoctrinated.”

In court papers, the school system argued that the need to comply with nondiscrimination laws and “to ensure a classroom environment that is safe and conducive to learning for all students” overrode parental objections.

The system made a similar argument in a 2022 lawsuit that three parents filed to overturn its policy of requiring schools to hide students’ gender transitions from unsupportive parents.

U.S. District Judge Paul W. Grimm, an Obama appointee, upheld the district’s “compelling interest” to protect transgender and nonbinary students from parental abuse in an August 2022 ruling dismissing the suit.

Rick Claybrook, an attorney who represented the parents in that case, said the success of the new opt-out process will depend on whether school officials continue to hide such things from families.

“This appears to be a positive first step, but how effective this process will be remains to be seen,” Mr. Claybrook said in an email.

• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.