School district faces backlash for requiring students to participate in LGBT ‘coming out’ exercise
February 6, 2025
A California school district is under fire after a teacher allegedly required students to take part in a role-playing exercise adapted from the LGBT activist group The Trevor Project.
The Christian Post reports that lawyers for parents in the Vista Unified School District (VUSD) in San Diego say their legal rights were violated during a gender ideology exercise called “Coming Out Stars.”
The exercise took place in a freshman class at Rancho Buena Vista High School and instructed students to imagine that each of them “is now gay or lesbian” and about to begin the “coming out process.”
Attorney Dean Broyles with the National Center for Law & Policy (NCLP) said some of the students refused to participate, citing religious objections and walked out of the classroom.
Broyles and the NCLP say that the school district failed to notify parents about the lessons which included a separate classroom activity involving a “gender unicorn” diagram promoting gender identity education.
According to the Christian Post, under the California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), school districts are required to give advance notice of the lessons to parents and the opportunity to opt their children out of the sexual education courses.
The school district is accused of working around the CHYA law by embedding the gender identity lessons into non-sex education courses in order to prevent them from opting their children out of the classroom.
In a statement, Broyles said, “Parents have the right to know exactly what their children are being taught in school about human sexuality, especially when that teaching contradicts their family’s sincerely held and constitutionally protected religious beliefs.”
The NCLP has called upon the district to formally apologize to parents and students for the role-playing activity and to implement immediate reforms to ensure that VUSD curriculum complies with state laws regarding parental notification and the ability to opt students out of sex ed classes.
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