District allegedly 'altered ... official records' to conceal treating middle-school girl as a boy without telling her parents

A Michigan couple has sued their local school district after several district employees allegedly began treating the couple's daughter as a boy and then "altered the girl's official records" to conceal their actions.

Dan and Jennifer Mead live in Rockford, Michigan, a city of about 5,000 residents located 15 miles northeast of Grand Rapids. Their daughter, identified only as G.M., began attending Rockford Public Schools in kindergarten and continued attending until October 2022, the fall of her eighth-grade year.

For most of that time, the Meads believed that G.M. received a solid education from the district's schools and teachers. So in January 2021, when G.M. was having trouble adjusting to East Rockford Middle School as a sixth-grader, Jennifer Mead started corresponding with ERMS counselor Erin Cole so that they could work together to get G.M. back on track.

Because of Cole's ready willingness to meet with G.M. and keep an eye on her progress, Jennifer Mead began to trust Cole, and the women sent emails back and forth to each other for the better part of two years.

However, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Meads by Alliance Defending Freedom, for about five months, Cole and other ERMS officials had been calling G.M. a boy's name and referring to her using masculine pronouns — and they never told the Meads a word about it.

The evidence laid out in the lawsuit is damning.

According to the suit, G.M. sent Cole an electronic message in May 2022, asking the counselor to call her a boy's name that begins with F. Cole then allegedly spread the word with various other ERMS staff members. The staff members apparently readily complied with the offhanded request from a seventh-grader diagnosed with autism and other mental health disorders because the lawsuit is fraught with copies of intra-school messages which refer to G.M. as F.M. and with masculine pronouns.

The following are just a handful of excerpted messages and other records allegedly written in late summer or early fall 2022 and contained in the lawsuit:

• In August, the start of G.M.'s eighth-grade year, Cole emailed all of the teachers on her schedule: "When you each have a second, could you please call me or stop down[?] You have a student listed on your roster as G[] M[] that I want to give you a little insight on."
• In a case activity log created for G.M. in August, school neuropsychologist Heather Slater described G.M. as "female but transitioning to male. Goes by F[] ... @ school & G[] @ home."
• In early September, school social worker Dawn Thorsen wrote to Cole, "F[] might be stopping by to see you today. He tried earlier and the office was locked which is how he ended up in my office. He’s a super cool kid-I really enjoyed my time with him. He’s very self aware!"
• Also in September, Assistant Principal Kyle Avink sent an email with the subject line "FM," saying, "I wanted to reach out to you and let you know that we are currently discussing F[] (G[] in the system) M[] within our [building consultation] team."

Yet, all the while, Dan and Jennifer Mead were kept in the dark. In fact, some ERMS employees may have gone to great lengths to keep them there. According to the lawsuit, Slater, the neuropsychologist, even changed a document after Dan Mead had signed it because it accidentally contained a message referring to G.M. as F.M. and using male pronouns.

"I edited all the responses to change the ones where they called him F[] and changed it to G[] in the write up," Slater allegedly wrote to Principal Adam Burkholder in part in October 2022. "... This wasn’t to hide anything from parents, it’s just the policy for legal documents."

The straw that broke the camel's back for the Meads, though, seemed to be when Cole, a woman they had trusted to have G.M.'s best interest at heart, allegedly gave G.M. a homoerotic graphic novel to read. "Heartstopper: Volume 1" is a story about a romance between two teenage boys and includes "many instances of profanity and crude anatomical references," the lawsuit claimed.

When the Meads confronted Principal Burkholder about the book and the alleged lying and obfuscations about G.M.'s gender and identity, Burkholder reportedly insisted that ERMS employees were simply following the mandates of the Michigan Department of Education regarding students who identify as transgender. However, the "State made clear that '[t]hese guidelines are voluntary and should not be considered mandates or requirements,'" the lawsuit countered.

Burkholder also could not guarantee the Meads that the district would not continue the charade going forward, the lawsuit said, so the Meads elected to withdraw G.M. from the district and homeschool her instead. The move has forced Dan Mead to leave his job to oversee G.M.'s education at home, costing the family a significant portion of their income.

The Meads also allege that the district's actions in treating G.M. as a boy violated their deeply held Christian beliefs. In the lawsuit, they are asking a "declaration that the District’s policy facially and as applied to the Meads violates the Meads’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights under the United States Constitution," as well as court costs and other fees.

"Schools should never deliberately hide vital information from parents, yet that’s exactly what the Rockford Public School District did," said Kate Anderson, director of ADF’s Center for Parental Rights. "... By intentionally concealing this information from the Meads, the school district violated their constitutionally protected right to make decisions regarding their daughter’s education and wellbeing and destroyed the trust the Mead family had placed in the district and its employees."

In response to a request for comment about the lawsuit, RPS Superintendent Dr. Steve Matthews sent Blaze News the following statement:

Thank you for asking us about this issue. We actually have not been served with any legal documents. I assume that they are coming.

So for now our comment would be that we have no comment at this time because we have not been given notice of this legal proceeding.

It seems they have gone to the media and not to us with this legal proceeding.

At some point we will comment but right now we have no information so we will refrain from discussing this issue right now.

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