Last week, the Department of Education put Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland and Ann Arbor Public Schools in Michigan on notice for hiding students’ so-called “gender identity” from their parents. The Department alleges that in doing so, the districts violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), putting them at risk of losing federal funding. This comes on the heels of a Department investigation that found California had likewise violated FERPA by hiding students’ gender transitions from their parents, and a similar investigation now open in Maine.
One state that has yet to make the list—but should—is New Mexico, as recent reporting from IW Features shows.
When a 6-year-old girl came home upset from her elementary school in the state’s capital, Santa Fe, her mother, Kristy Ojinaga, initially assumed her daughter had just had a bad day. But after some probing, Ojinaga learned her daughter had been sharing a bathroom with a male classmate who had allegedly exposed himself in class the year before—something the school, she told IW Features, had also failed to disclose to parents.
Administrators told Ojinaga that federal privacy law barred them from discussing another student’s “gender identity.” Indeed, the “gender support plan” the school had built for the male student who had troubled her daughter might not even be accessible to his own parents.
Across town, Santa Fe mom Dana Tapia was hearing something similar from her first-grader, Levi. His male classmate, who identified as a girl named “Rosa,” had also exposed himself in class.
“Levi told me, ‘Mom, he has hands in his pants, and sometimes he just stares at me,'” Tapia told IW Features. “‘There were times where he would pull his pants down and mess around with it. That’s actually how I realized he was a boy.'”
As Tapia’s account shows, parents were never informed that Rosa was actually a boy—again, supposedly because of FERPA, per administrators.
Tapia later learned that New Mexico parents can obtain a new birth certificate with a changed sex marker for a child for just $15, a loophole that lets schools sidestep federal mandates requiring proof of sex.
When another parent in Tapia’s school complained about the same student, the principal asked Tapia why she and the others couldn’t just go along with it, leading Tapia to pull her son out of the school and enroll him in a private Christian school instead.
And at yet another Santa Fe school, New Mexico mom Laura Girdner found out her twin fourth-grade daughters had been shown an unannounced sex-ed video—even though she had opted her daughters out of the school’s puberty lesson. The description of the material they had been forced to watch was so absurd that Girdner and her husband assumed the girls must have somehow misunderstood what they’d seen: a man in a dress using a magic wand to give girls in the video pubic hair.
“So we look up the video, and it’s called ‘The Puberty Fairy,’ and it’s very much like a comedy thing. You would expect to see it on ‘Saturday Night Live,'” she told IW Features. “It’s certainly not educational or for children. It’s very offensive.”
Girdner realized similar instruction was likely happening behind her back at her older son’s middle school. But when she asked to see the curriculum used in her son’s class, a representative from the publisher, tied to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, refused to share it because it was supposedly “proprietary information.”
Taken together, these stories show that New Mexico officials are weaponizing the law—FERPA, copyright, whatever’s most convenient—to lock parents out of their children’s education.
Making matters worse is the fact that all three stories come from the state capital. To be clear, this would be alarming no matter where it happened, but the fact that it’s happening in Santa Fe—the city that houses the state legislature and the Public Education Department; the city that is supposed to set the standard for the rest of New Mexico—makes it especially damning.
As Laura Girdner told IW Features, “The people we know who’ve been born and raised here for the most part are not the ones that are kind of trying to impose this agenda––all the transgender stuff and LGBTQ and abortion.”
Elites in New Mexico, as elsewhere, have pushed this agenda over the objections of the people who actually live there, foreclosing any real debate. And despite a federal crackdown on schools doing exactly this elsewhere, New Mexico’s elites thus far have had the hubris to keep going.
At this point, given New Mexico’s egregious record and its insistence on doubling down on a failed, unpopular ideology, it’s time for the federal government to subject its schools to the same scrutiny it has applied to Maryland, Michigan, California, and Maine. After all, New Mexico parents have already learned what those in other states have: that the schools and legislators their taxes fund will continue to run roughshod over their rights as parents, and the only recourse left—besides homeschooling or private schools that may not be attainable or accessible to everyone—is a federal agency a thousand miles away.
