A Colorado lawsuit has become a flashpoint in the national fight over school-imposed gender policies and student privacy. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed their an opening brief Wednesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit on behalf of four Colorado families suing their school district over the district’s policy of assigning males who identify as girls to female hotel rooms on overnight school trips. Joe and Serena Wailes, Bret and Susanne Roller, Rob and Jade Perlman, and their children are challenging Jefferson County Public Schools for violating parents’ fundamental right to make decisions about the upbringing and education of their children.. And now, after a federal judge dismissed an initial challenge, the courts appear ready to give districts broad discretion to overrule parental objections to transgender-based rooming practices that place their girls in school trip sleeping quarters with biological males.
For the families leading the case, the issue is not complicated: Parents have the right to know, and to give consent, before their children are placed in intimate settings with biologically opposite-sex students. Attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom Legal say families repeatedly asked for clarity about how overnight accommodations would be assigned but received evasive answers, vague language, or misleading statements. Parents insist they were never plainly told what the district’s policy was or how their children would be housed during school-sponsored trips.
Their concerns extend far beyond paperwork. Many families, particularly those with younger children, describe the situation as a matter of safety and bodily privacy. Reporting from outlets such as Fox News and World News Group has documented rising alarm over minors being required to sleep, undress, or shower near students of the opposite biological sex. Parents say these are circumstances that would be unacceptable for adults supervising unrelated children, yet are being normalized in the name of inclusion.
Adding to the tension is the claim that Jefferson County Public Schools withheld truthful and pertinent information from parents, preventing them from making informed decisions about whether their children should attend certain trips. Critics argue that this lack of transparency strips families of authority and pushes them into compliance with policies they never had a fair chance to assess. Even parents who support respectful treatment of transgender students say bedrooms, beds, and bathing areas demand absolute clarity. Their view is straightforward: biological sex matters when children are placed in vulnerable and intimate environments.
The fight is now escalating. Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys have taken the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in its lawsuit stating that Jefferson County Public Schools violated the right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.
At the heart of the appeal is a simple demand. The families want the district to stop placing children in shared bedrooms, beds, and shower facilities with members of the opposite biological sex. They also want the district to stop doing so without parental knowledge or consent. They say they are not challenging any student’s identity but are trying to protect their children from uncomfortable or unsafe situations. Their argument is that the district’s policy infringes on bodily privacy, religious freedom, and parental authority.
“Parents, not government bureaucrats, have the right and responsibility to direct the upbringing and education of their children,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson. She noted that while the district claims to grant accommodations to all students, it refuses to offer sex-separated options for families with religious or privacy-based objections. For these parents, protecting their children’s modesty and honoring their moral convictions cannot be dismissed by administrators promoting ideological conformity.
ADF’s brief describes what parents call a deliberate shift in language. The district assures families that girls will be roomed together and boys will be roomed together, while redefining girl and boy to refer to gender identity rather than biological sex. Parents argue that this linguistic shift conceals the information they need to protect their children. Some families received no explanation at all. Others received carefully worded statements. In every case, parents say the effect was the same: they were denied the truth.
The consequences, they say, are not theoretical. On one school-sponsored trip, the Wailes family’s 11-year-old daughter was placed in a hotel room with two girls and a biological male who identifies as female, something her parents learned only after the trip. In another case, the Rollers discovered that a biologically female student had been placed in their young son’s cabin and had even monitored his showers, again without any notice. The Perlmans, whose daughter had previously endured sexual harassment at a district middle school, say they refuse to risk her being housed with a biological boy.
For these families, the controversy is not a culture-war abstraction. They view it as lived experience that reveals how far Jefferson County Public Schools has drifted from transparency, common sense, and its basic duty to protect children.
