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Granite School District illegally asks kids their pronouns through CANVAS

Why is Granite School District breaking the law? And how in the world are they getting away with it? The answer may surprise you….

These screenshots were taken in December of 2021.

 

What you are looking at is 3 different student profile pages on the CANVAS web-based learning management system used by almost every Utah school district. Kids access CANVAS on a daily basis multiple times in order to check their grades, complete school work, communicate with teachers and other students, etc.

In a nutshell, CANVAS gets used — a lot. Teachers and administrators and even outside third-parties have access to the data that is on CANVAS…keep this in mind.

What you are seeing on the screenshots is Granite School District surveying students for their PRONOUNS related to their personally held gender/sexual identity beliefs. And if you have a minor student enrolled in a concurrent enrollment course through Salt Lake Community College, that child gets an even wider choice of LGBTetc-inspired pronouns to choose from.

This is against the law.

Utah State Board of Education Rule R277-217(2)(23j and 24) states that an educator may not: “Encourage a student to develop a prejudice on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identification [or]… knowingly or intentionally permit unauthorized collection sharing or use of student data.”R277-217(3)(b) states that:”[A]n educator shall maintain appropriate verbal emotional and social boundaries. “In Utah state code 53e-9-203(1)(c), it lists ‘”Activities prohibited without prior written consent–:

Policies adopted by a school district or charter school… shall include prohibitions on the administration to a student of any psychological or psychiatric examination, test, or treatment, or any survey, analysis, or evaluation without the prior written consent of the student’s parent, in which the purpose or evident intended effect is to cause the student to reveal information, whether the information is personally identifiable or not, concerning the student’s or any family member’s … sexual behavior, orientation, or attitudes.”

Do you remember at the beginning of this 2021-22 school year how your kids were asked by their teachers about their preferred personal pronouns? And how upset parents were by this unauthorized, illegal survey of their children’s sexual politics? Parents complained in droves, to the point where, as reported by KCPW, even Utah State Board of Education State Superintendent Sydnee Dickson “alerted district administrators that asking gender identity questions does not comply with federal and state statutes.”

https://www.kpcw.org/…/utah-teachers-directed-not-to…

And yet despite this warning of illegality, someone at Granite School District authorized the asking of a gender identity question (pronouns) through its district-wide grading and curriculum CANVAS software. Who at GSD is breaking the law? We don’t have the answer to that question yet, but we do have a theory as to why parents have no clue that it’s happening.

As our children’s educations have been moved without our consent to mainly digital platforms, parents are realizing that the content of their children’s learning is less transparent and highly susceptible to dynamic change.

Did Granite School District notify any parents that they were adding pronouns to their children’s online profiles?

No.

How long have children had the ability to provide this information to their teachers, administrators, and other third parties without parental awareness?

Who knows?

Parents should be up in arms about a district circumventing their right to know the personal information that schools are soliciting from their children…and in this case they are doing it illegally.

Whether you have kids in or outside Granite School District (the state’s largest school district, by the way), check your child’s CANVAS account. If pronouns are being solicited, CONTACT the district immediately and demand that they comply with the law.

We’ll leave you with this final cautionary note: this isn’t the first time your child’s right to a politically neutral education has been violated and it won’t be the last. When those who run the education system can make bad decisions with no accountability, who do they really serve?