Republican Tom Tiffany proposes parents’ bill of rights

Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany is proposing a bill of rights for parents and teachers, which includes requiring parental permission for students who want to change their names and pronouns at school and banning transgender students from bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

Tiffany released his proposal as in-person early voting kicked off last week and with a little over a week to go before Election Day. Tiffany has sought to leverage divisions over cultural policies in schools since he launched his campaign last year. 

Under his proposal, transgender girls would be prohibited from participating on girls’ sports teams and using girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms in schools, schools would be prohibited from placing tampons in boys’ bathrooms and “gender transition procedures” would be prohibited for those under 18.

“Every child deserves a safe classroom, every teacher deserves the authority to maintain order, and every parent deserves to know what is happening in their child’s school,” Tiffany said in a statement.

Last month, Tiffany appeared at a town hall hosted by Moms For Liberty, a right-wing organizing group for parents well known for supporting book bans and targeting schools over policies related to transgender children. Keeping transgender girls out of girls’ sports was one of the first priorities Tiffany mentioned at the Moms For Liberty town hall.

Tina Descovich, one of the founders of Moms for Liberty, who traveled to Wisconsin from Florida for the event, said that the organization is targeting women who don’t ordinarily vote in get out the vote efforts in Wisconsin. She said the election presents voters with a choice that could take the state in two very different directions.

“You can continue with someone who believes that boys should be playing with girls in sports. You can continue with someone that thinks mothers should be called inseminated persons,” Desovich said, using terminology that Tiffany’s opponent, David Crowley, has in fact not endorsed. (Gov. Tony Evers was criticized for the use of the term in budget language referring to artificial insemination.)

Noting Tiffany’s plane crash, Descovich said she thought God saved Tiffany for the state of Wisconsin. 

Tiffany’s proposal would also require that parents be able to review instructional materials, that schools notify parents and obtain consent before letting a student go by a different name or use different pronouns in school, require schools notify parents about violence, threats and crimes that occur on school grounds, implement school report cards, require schools to give parents information about their child’s academic proficiency and classroom behavior twice a year. 

His proposal would allow teachers to remove violent or disruptive students; require behavior intervention plans before a student could be returned to a classroom; prohibit retaliation against teachers for enforcing classroom rules, reporting unsafe conditions, requesting assistance or taking appropriate action to protect students; and establish school safety and parental notification requirements. 

In contrast, Democratic candidate and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley has focused his education platform on increasing funding for public schools, including for special education, and providing universal early childhood education for Wisconsinites.

Tiffany’s campaign pointed to the New Richmond school district, which has been the target of an investigation by the Trump administration over its bathroom policies, and a report in the conservative Heartland Post, an online outlet run by talk radio host O’Donnell, about Winneconne High School, where a superintendent retired after controversy over the school district allowing an 18-year-old student to use a preferred name, instead of a legal name, used in the school’s graduation ceremony without the parents’ permission.

Wisconsin Republicans have repeatedly introduced bills that would implement a parents’ bill of rights and require permission before students could go by different names. In the past, lawmakers received help with drafting these measures from the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. 

Gov. Tony Evers has vetoed those bills. In one veto message, he said the bill was “neither aimed at supporting our parents, our kids, and our schools, nor improving student outcomes, nor fostering collaboration and communication to do what is best for our kids,” but was rather “another attempt to divide our schools and communities and inject political ideology in the very last place it belongs — in our classrooms and our schools.”