Over the last year I’ve been working with our local school system to include preferred pronouns in their student information system. The use case for this arose out of direct experience with one of my own kids being misgendered in a classroom. Now as a technology-savvy parent, it is not like you check out the source code of your school’s student information system and go patch the problem yourself - instead you contact overworked administrators at the local district level, show up to community engagement meetings, and provide end-user feedback throughout the process. It is incredibly mundane but important work that you should be doing if gender inclusivity is something that matters to you.
Typically each new school year my non-binary kiddo emails all of their teachers, introduces themselves, and shares their pronouns. It is great that they have the confidence and communication skills to do this but this simple action places an unnecessary burden and unreasonable expectation on any student where pronoun usage can make or break even the smallest of daily interactions. Every time my kid receives a communication at home (physical mail, email, letter home from school, etc) that misgenders them it is the same pattern - they read it, I watch their entire body slump in sadness, and they retreat to somewhere in the house where they can deal with their feelings in private. Imagine this happening N times at school where the comforts of home aren’t available.
At some point in my kid’s junior high experience they were misgendered at school by a substitute teacher. The substitute was doing roll call, called my child’s name, and my child said “present.” This is a routine thing that would happen at the beginning of any classroom experience and it should be a frictionless thing. Instead the substitute looked at my child, decided their presentation did not match the name on the roll sheet in front of them and told them to “stop messing around and let the real person say present for themselves.” Substitute teachers are famously given a hard time by students, particular junior high ones, and so I hold no ill-will towards this person.
We are lucky in my district to have some local school site Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion parent sub-committees and the school my kid was at happened to have one. Thankfully this meeting also had participation from the principal of the school. I brought this experience to this group and there was general support that it should not have happened. The principal pointed out that every substitute teacher is given a roll sheet and that perhaps if we could have pronouns listed on there it would avoid the problem from happening again. The principal said they would mention this to the district. At virtually every monthly meeting after that I would ask about the status of this issue and was told someone was looking into it.
Eventually our district created a district level Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion group with involvement from admins, parents, students, and teachers across the entire district. I brought the roll sheet+pronouns issue there and while it was disappointing to realize this was the first time anyone at the district was learning of this issue I was immediately met with support and real actionable goals. The head of this group, a district employee, would bring the problem to the team in charge of the student information system. This was because the physically printed out roll sheets given to a substitute teacher at any school in our district are created by the district from the student information system. In order to have a “preferred pronoun” listed on the roll sheet the data would have to be somewhere in the student information system.
Unlike my experience at the local school site level, at the district level things progressively moved forward. Each month some type of progress was demonstrated. The matter was being reviewed by the legal team to ensure compliance with State of California requirements around student privacy. The technology team was working with those legal requirements to implemented a solution. The teams were meeting local school site guidance counselors to train them on how the solution would be implemented. There are a lot of moving parts to even a single form field being added to a system that has to meet multiple stakeholders - including meeting compliance needs enforced by state or federal laws.
At the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year the digital registration forms sent out to every parent included a spot for them to list their child’s preferred pronouns. There are still lingering issues relating to display of this data but progress is being made and I’m still showing up to monthly meetings to move the issue along.
I share this experience to point out that if you are someone who cares about gender inclusivity in our local schools that there is really valuable work you can do as a parent to represent the issues. You can ask your local school administrators about whether you can list preferred pronouns on your student’s profiles. If you cannot you can go to your school district and ask them about it. It is important to note that many districts will have policies and procedures for legally changing your child’s sex - but that’s not what we are doing here. We are just trying to list things like preferred name or pronouns in data systems so that when people interact with our kids it is normal and to be expected that we ask them for their pronouns and don’t make assumptions about who they are based on visual presentation.
It can be infuriating and helpless to watch politicians on the national stage complain about “drag queen story hour” or whatever other nonsense issues they’ve created out of thin air. But the counter to this is to find the nuts-and-bolts stuff like classroom rollsheets to work on locally. The stuff that students and teachers have to deal with every day, the mundane stuff. My own area of expertise is user experience and so I tried to think about all the different users of the system, what their goals were, where they want to use the enhancement, and to imagine myself in their shoes as they were interacting with the systems. You probably have your own lens of expertise that you can see things through and you should find ways to apply those skills.
When you engage your school district about these issues you can do so calmly, bring a use case or two, and have patience. Every one I’ve interacted with about this topic has first and foremost wanted to support my student and make sure they are having a good school experience. It takes time for changes to core data systems (like the student one) to pass through legal review and for training materials to be updated. Things are not moving slowly because gender inclusivity is not a priority — things are moving slowly because the legal team is overworked, the training team is overworked, the third party vendor that the data system is outsourced to has their own backlog of software enhancements they are working through. (Sound familiar? Is your owm workplace understaffed and overworked?) You have to stay engaged, show up to the community meetings, and politely hold those who can take direct action accountable. It takes a couple hours of your time each month but it will help people going forward - including kids long afters yours have moved on - to feel safe and welcome in their classrooms.