(NewsNation) — Community members at a school board meeting in Granby, Connecticut, got very heated Wednesday night over a video the school district showed to lower grade students.
The uproar is over a 45-second video celebrating Pride month that includes messaging about transgender issues to children.
A portion of the video says: “Pride means you should be able to be free. All my life I never really felt like a boy and I don’t really feel like a girl, so I’d rather be both.”
Some opposed to the video argued that sexuality should be kept out of school and left to parents.
“The same way we keep religion, politics, everything out of school. Keep sexuality out of school. Leave it to the parents,” one parent said.
Another person at the meeting added: “(I’m) not being asked to be notified about everything that goes across the principal’s desk, but I think there should be some sensitivity because I expect my kids who go to school to be challenged in many ways. This is a situation where they were challenged in a way that maybe I didn’t expect.”
Some showed up at the meeting to support the video being shown to students.
“We have these folks in our communities and our families and our neighborhoods,” one person at the meeting said. “So, I just think that’s really important for us to notice. It’s not a theoretical conversation. This is an actual conversation, and people’s lives are at stake.”
Resident Matt Brady is the parent of a transgender child.
“I understand that the video made some parents uncomfortable, and I understand you feel that sensitive topics should be discussed at home. I totally respect that. But these topics are obviously not being discussed at home, or else there wouldn’t be such an uproar,” Brady said. “But those of you who think the kids are too young to know that transgender people and kids who have two dads exist, I remind you that fifth graders at school are sitting in the same seats that my son sat in two years ago.”
The principal of the school wrote an email to parents addressing the video.
“It certainly was not intended to alienate or disturb any child. In context, we are trying to remind students that it is OK to be who you are and still be treated with respect, dignity and kindness,” Wells Road Intermediate School Principal Pauline Greer said.
Kyle Reyes, a father of two children in the school, listened to the meeting on Zoom. He believes the video is inappropriate for school.
“It’s inappropriate to be having these conversations in the classroom, especially without the knowledge of the parents,” Reyes said.
Nick Damato, who says he grew up in an LGBTQ+ friendly community household and has children in the school, agrees.
“My father is an openly gay man, married to my stepmother. My mom is an openly lesbian woman. We were instilled the values that you are very welcoming and accepting to people, but we were also taught that God gave us certain rights that the Constitution spells out for us and that a lot of service members have fought and died for to protect us,” Damato said. “So, it’s important to have a balance between the two and to violate that by sending this material to third, fourth and fifth graders is unacceptable.”
The superintendent of Granby Public Schools said the school district plans to “work to communicate more effectively in the future.”