Pushback from parents at Schavey Road Elementary in DeWitt last month forced school officials to rescind a pronoun lesson plan less than a week after notifying a first-grade classroom’s parents about it. The district argued it did so not because of the lesson’s ideological nature or the young age of its intended recipients, but because of “threatening calls, emails, and social media messages.”
Unreported until now, however, is that the school’s decision to cancel the lesson was too little, too late. Schavey Road Elementary mom, Jessica Berkhousen, told Enjoyer the first-graders had already received lessons in pronouns and gender ideology before the school sent its notification letter to parents. It seems the only reason the school bothered to send the notification letter at all was to cover its tracks when parents started asking questions.
In other words, both notice and cancellation were ad hoc acts of CYA for an unapproved pronouns brainwashing course that had already occurred.
DeWitt parents are understandably frustrated. At six years old, kids should be learning how to ride a bike and add and subtract — not how to correctly refer to others using “tree/trees” pronouns.
For those wondering, the correct way to use “tree/trees” in conversation is quite simple: you don’t. Nor should you use “ze/zen,” “they/them,” or any of the other nonsensical phrases progressives treat as legitimate “gender identities.”
Public school officials in DeWitt, Michigan, appear to disagree.
The controversy started back in April, when administrators at Schavey Road Elementary School notified a first-grade classroom’s parents of the school’s plans to “help” their students “share and explore pronouns.”
“We would like to inform you of a lesson that will be taught in your child’s classroom,” an April 11 letter to the parents said. “The lesson goals are to help students share and explore pronouns through discussion and literature to embrace differences and promote acceptance.”
Teachers planned to cite the book They She He Me: Free to Be!, according to the school.
Here are just a few snippets from the book: “On the inside, you may not feel like a he or she at all,” it reads. “Maybe they feels most free or you may feel like both she and he.”
It continues: “You can use your own name as a pronoun. You can change pronouns from he to she or she to he. You can use new ones like ze or create your own like tree! Some people use they, which is a perfect way. There are many more pronouns waiting to be discovered and used.”
The letter went on to note that parents would have the option to remove their children from the lesson.
Still, DeWitt parents were outraged that the school would even think to push such a controversial topic on young children, just five and six years old.
One such parent was Brandi Strahan, a mother of three and former employee at DeWitt Public Schools.
Strahan said she wouldn’t consider herself a culture warrior or political junkie — quite the opposite. She’s a concerned mom and person of deep conviction who recognized that Schavey Road’s pronoun lesson undermined her family’s values.
Strahan drew attention to Schavey Road’s pronoun lesson on social media and found that many other parents in the DeWitt community shared her concerns.
“These little kids, they have no clue,” Strahan shared, citing her own young son as an example. She said that when her son was 4 years old, he went through a phase where he believed he was a girl. Strahan raised his confusion to her pediatrician, who reassured her that the majority of young children grow out of any dysphoria. And sure enough, Strahan’s son did just that.
But what if he had been encouraged by school officials to adopt new pronouns and maybe even a new name and new identity?
In their rush to promote the progressive idea of “inclusion” and “acceptance,” it seems Schavey Elementary ignored entirely the demonstrable harm that gender ideology can have on young minds. “[This ideology] takes from the kids,” Strahan said. “It takes away their identity, their personhood — someone who God said was either a boy or a girl, this is who you are.”
This all raises another concern shared by Strahan, Berkhousen, and other parents in the community: how can they be sure that the school really will respect their wishes and butt out? The pronoun lesson might have been canceled on paper, but only after it had already been taught to an entire classroom of first-grade students — without parental consent.
And school officials’ response in the aftermath has only heightened concerns that the school would rather hide its ideological agenda from parents than seek and respect families’ input. According to Berkhousen and others with direct knowledge of the situation, Schavey Elementary scolded the affected first-graders’ parents in a separate email when news of the pronoun lesson got out. Rather than apologizing, school officials tried to get them to keep it quiet.
But as Strahan put it, silence isn’t an option when your kids’ well-being is on the line.
“I do believe it’s still going to be a battle that we’re going to have to fight,” she said. “And when it comes to my kids, I feel that burden. Because if I don’t give them a childhood, no one will.”
Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X at @KayleeDMcGhee.
