By Chris Powell
Does Hartford’s school system inform a student’s parents when it learns that the student may be dealing with gender dysphoria? That’s the important question raised by the system’s suspension of a school nurse who recently wrote on social media that school staffers keep such issues secret from parents.
The school system is working hard to avoid answering, instead obscuring the issue by accusing the nurse of misconduct. The nurse, Kathleen Cataford, who worked at the Kinsella Magnet School in Hartford, wrote on her Facebook page last month:
“As a public school nurse, I have an 11-year-old female student on puberty blockers and a dozen identifying as non-binary, all but two keeping this as a secret from their parents with the help of teachers, social workers, and school administration. … Children are introduced to this confusion in kindergarten by the school social worker who ‘teaches’ social and emotional regulation and school expectations.”
In response, Hartford Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez accused the nurse of revealing “private and personal details about a specific student” and making students “feel unwelcome.” But the nurse had identified no student by name, nor even her school, and her school has about 800 students, presumably many of them 11. If questioning school policy on gender dysphoria is to be construed as making students “feel unwelcome,” then of course the policy cannot be questioned at all, which may be the superintendent’s idea.
Last week this column put simple questions about the case to a publicist for the Hartford school system: Is what the nurse wrote true? Do school staffers necessarily report gender dysphoria issues to parents?
The publicist replied that school nurses don’t administer medicine to students. But that was not one of the questions.
Pressed, the publicist replied that school staff members encourage students to discuss their gender dysphoria with their parents. That wasn’t responsive either.
Pressed again, the publicist said Hartford school staff members dealing with a student’s gender dysphoria follow written guidance from the state Education Department. But exactly how has Hartford’s school system construed that guidance in the context of the nurse’s assertions? That is, are parents told or not? If not, why not?
The publicist again refused to answer. He also refused to facilitate a call to the superintendent so she might be questioned directly about school system policy and practice and the veracity of the nurse’s assertions.
Thus Hartford’s school administration is following the stonewalling and concealment policy that used to be followed by the state Department of Children and Families when mistakes broke into public view. Like the DCF of old, the Hartford school administration is hiding behind its children to escape accountability.
DCF covered up that way for decades but eventually it was so discredited that it had to change. The change was hastened when the General Assembly created the office of the state child advocate to investigate and report on the department’s worst failures. The department is much improved for it.
There is no similar agent of accountability for school systems in Connecticut. School boards could do the job but, as the ubiquitous policy of social promotion suggests, few boards have even one member with the wit and courage to ask critical questions. If Hartford’s Board of Education has any members curious to know whether, as that school nurse contends, the school system itself is planting gender dysphoria in the minds of kindergarteners and then helping students conceal it from their parents, such members have not come forward.
Indeed, amid their political correctness Connecticut’s news organizations are no more curious. While a few have reported that a Hartford school nurse has been suspended for “inappropriate” comments on Facebook, none has reported what the controversy is really about. To get that information Connecticut has had to turn to the London Daily Mail.
The Hartford school system’s policy of concealing crucial information from parents may not work much longer. Similar incidents of concealment and unaccountability are popping up in schools all over the country. They show why public education is really not so public at all and thus not to be trusted.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
Chris Powell column 