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Donnelly: La Center schools should resist state on pronouns

By Ann Donnelly

Published: April 5, 2025, 6:01am

The La Center School District is working diligently to raise reading and math scores. According to its 2025 District Address, it has made measurable improvements. It stresses multiple career pathways for students, such as trades, college, military and workforce. In 2024, the district achieved an improved 92 percent graduation rate.

Fundamental to these successes for students, it asserts, is partnering with families.

These basics-focused improvements have delivered strong bonds within the community. In the February special election, voters approved the district’s levy with a 59 percent “yes” vote, while Battle Ground’s levy and Hockinson’s bond were rejected.

Voters thus delivered a well-earned vote of confidence, yet the state of Washington finds fault. The issue is Pronoun Policy, relating to students’ gender identity.

The district crafted its policy in 2022 to achieve a middle ground, keeping parents informed while allowing students to decide whether they want to publicly state their pronouns. An update requires a school to inform parents if a student asks to change their pronouns or questions their gender.

The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction contends this policy violates state law.

At issue is a policy to ask students the name with which they want to be identified, but not to require statement of preferred pronouns. As directed by Superintendent Peter Rosenkranz, “You can use students’ preferred pronouns and names if they request. If a student would like to be different, they need to let you know … ”

Also at issue is the district’s practice of involving parents and guardians in the conversation. The district “should not know more about the child than their parents,” according to Rosenkranz.

In November 2022, a teacher submitted a civil rights complaint to La Center High School’s principal, on the grounds that not soliciting pronouns of every student “is direct discrimination in that it is an apparently neutral rule that affects the LGBTQ and only the LGBTQ community.”

An independent report by RLR Consulting of Spokane, commissioned to assess the district’s pronoun policy, found that Superintendent Rosenkranz’s directives violates no student’s civil rights.

Now, OSPI asserts that the district “discriminates against students and staff based on gender identity … by expressly prohibiting district staff from asking any student their gender pronouns.”

OSPI claims control over district policy, stating that “the district must complete each of the following corrective actions”: Adopt the state’s prescribed model Gender-Inclusive Schools policy and procedure; publish such on its website; monitor compliance; inform all students, parents and guardians, volunteers and employees of the newly compliant state-based policy; rescind its previous directives; not inform parents or guardians of students’ changes of pronouns without the student’s consent. Staff must take “Bias Awareness Training.”

This is the state at its most authoritarian, imposing its will on the district’s staff, superintendent, school board and community.

The district is right to resist. On March 20, it filed an application to the Washington Office of Administrative Hearing to appeal OSPI’s findings. It will also file a Motion to Stay Implementation of Corrective Actions. The district asserts that under the law it can “adopt or amend” the state’s pronoun model, and that it has done so “to take into consideration the fundamental constitutional rights of parents in child rearing.”

The controversy intrudes into areas of students’ lifetime emotional and physical health. Inevitably, families are responsible, including for financial impacts. La Center’s voters have already weighed in, supporting the district.

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