You don’t have to wade into the superheated debate over gender identity and kids to conclude a Colorado school district was way out of line to foster a student’s gender transition while keeping the child’s parents in the dark.

Whatever one’s views on transgender issues, we all should be able to agree that parents, given their unique bond to their children, almost always have their children’s best interests at heart — and are better suited than anyone else to safeguard their children’s welfare. It is critical to every child’s healthy development to keep parents in the loop and in the middle of decision-making.

As reported this week in The Denver Gazette, a mom and dad in Brighton have filed suit against the Colorado Department of Education as well as their local 27J School District for encouraging their daughter to transition from a girl to a boy and keeping it from her parents.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

The couple, identified in the lawsuit as Jane and John Doe, allege that when their daughter was a 14-year-old freshman attending Brighton High School, she asked a school counselor to help her transition to a male.

“Following school policy, the counselor assisted A.D. with the transition,” the lawsuit states. “But neither the counselor nor anyone else at the school told the (parents).”

Instead, according to the lawsuit, the school concealed the transition from the Does by referring to their child by her given name in conversations and communications with the parents, yet using the child’s chosen name at school. The counselor also allegedly arranged for the youth to talk to a therapist and concealed it by letting the student use the counselor’s own computer for virtual therapy sessions so the parents wouldn’t find out.

The episode undermined the child’s trust in her parents, the lawsuit contends, although over the following year, the child came to have second thoughts about changing her gender identity.

The lawsuit seeks a court order barring the district from promoting and concealing gender transitions, and it seeks to strike down a law adopted by the Legislature and signed by the governor this year requiring public schools to use students’ “preferred” name reflecting their professed gender identity.

It’s not the only such case in our state. Denver Gazette investigative columnist Jimmy Sengenberger wrote this week about how a sixth grader in the Poudre School District in 2021 surreptitiously attended a Gender & Sexualities Alliance meeting at her school. At the meeting, as her mother recounted, the child was told, “parents might not be safe, that this is a confidential meeting, that what you hear in here, keep in here.” The daughter later came out as transgender though now no longer identifies as such.

The mom, Erin Lee — now the director of the advocacy group Protect Kids Colorado — contends such on-campus activities, “betray families, leaving parents feeling hopeless and excluded.”

Concealing a gender transition is of course only one way in which public schools can disrupt and even undermine parents’ bond to their kids. Sexuality, abortion, drugs, guns — you name it — are among many fraught topics on which school staffers might be tempted to intercede covertly into students’ personal lives. Their misbegotten assumption is educators know better than parents how to guide kids in making crucial, even life-changing decisions. They don’t.

The courts will decide whether the Brighton school district acted unconstitutionally and how the new state law comes into play.

What should be patently obvious without any court ruling is that schools shouldn’t be elbowing parents out of their children’s crucial life decisions. And on many personal matters, it’s the school that should butt out.

Parents have a sacred duty to raise their children. Let’s let them do so.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board