Columbus City Schools (CCS) shelled out more than $24,000 taxpayer dollars to a consulting firm that taught staff how to sneak radical gender ideology into classrooms without parents’ permission, a public records request made by Parents Defending Education revealed.
The two-day training in September 2022 was conducted by Q-inclusion, now known as “Hey Wes,” an organization led by a woman disguised as a man that boasts of partnering “with schools, healthcare clinics, businesses, and communities in order to support queer & trans belonging.”
Before the symposium, CCS had policies allowing students “affirming name and pronouns” to be “on all other documents, so long as this does not out them or put them in danger.” Some gender-bending students were also granted access to opposite-sex bathrooms and lockers.
During the sessions, CCS staff such as speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, school psychologists, and school counselors were schooled on methods and tools such as “gender support plan” sheets they could use to further their campaign to quietly force the LGBT agenda on children without parents’ knowledge.
CCS hires were specifically instructed what to do “when a student is out to you but not to their family” and how to handle “caregiver concerns and pushback” with conversation tactics while still hosting sexual conversations with children.
“Transgender and nonbinary students have a FERPA-protected right to privacy; this extends to students’ gender identity, birth name, sex assigned at birth and medical history. This includes privacy rights from parents/caregivers,” a Q-inclusion handout used for the training states.
Another set of slides boldly asserts that “children are not too young to talk about or know their gender” and that “gender expansiveness” should be discussed with toddlers.
Other slides used during the training included infamous imagery such as the genderbread person iteration, “the gender unicorn,” and the “wheel of power and privilege,” which argues that a mentally and financially stable, white, heterosexual, educated male in good health is the epitome of societal “privilege.”
The session hosts cited phony statistics from the Trevor Project, which not only promotes the mutation and castration of children but was recently caught hosting online, anonymous conversations about sex between adults and children.
Any religious staff who believe marriage is between a man and a woman and may have taken issue with some of the training’s content were educated on “What to do when your personal/religious beliefs don’t align with LGBTQ+ inclusion.”
Q-inclusion’s suggestion for staff looking for ways to promote “LBGT inclusion” starts with displaying pride flags, wearing pronoun pins, and calling boys and girls “Friends, scholars, learners, children, mascot/community name.”
The consultants also encouraged CCS staff to fill their offices and classrooms with sexually explicit books.
“Families assume that when their children’s teachers attend professional development sessions, educators learn how to be more effective. But as these documents show, taxpayer dollars were instead spent encouraging school officials to treat pupils differently on the basis of superficial characteristics, hide information from parents, and discuss adult content with young students,” President of Parents Defending Education Nicole Neily told The Federalist. “It’s appalling that Columbus City Schools would choose to spend its finite resources on a consultant pushing such toxic content on teachers — particularly because less than half of all students in the district are proficient in reading and math.”
