Maggie Gordon, Houston Landing

By outing 19 students to their parents, Texas school district violated ethics code

This article first appeared on Houston Landing and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Katy Independent School District’s decision to out transgender students to their parents is not only what one attorney described as “bullying masquerading as policy” – it’s also a violation of the Texas Education Agency’s code of ethics.

Last week, my Houston Landing colleague Miranda Dunlap reported that Katy ISD has called the parents of 19 students, informing those parents that their kid identifies as transgender or has requested to go by a different name or pronouns at school. That number, which Dunlap obtained through a public records request, shakes out to about two kids per week since August, when the school board first passed its policy requiring staff to notify parents of such situations.

And it’s likely that as the school year progresses, the number will only continue to climb, creating a wider wake of harm to these kids, some of whom are likely to have been outed to families that will not support their identities.

“This policy, in particular, has a distinct and really dangerous set of harms,” says Chloe Kempf, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. “We know that outing children against their will places them at risk of rejection, abuse in the home, and places them at an elevated risk of homelessness.”

Resources for Katy ISD parents and students

Here is general guidance from the ACLU of Texas for students who are affected by discriminatory policies:

Stay calm and document everything that happens. If a teacher, principal, or another student says something to you, try to record it, write it down, or confirm any information via email
Support each other and stand up against bullying, harassment, and anti-LGBTQ+ policies
When possible, try to find supportive parents, friends, and adults. Be aware that some school staff members may share information you tell them with your parents or guardians, even if they are not permitted to do so under state law

Some resources from the ACLU of Texas:

That’s not rhetoric. It’s fact. While about 12.5 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds report that they’ve experienced homelessness at some point in their lives, the rate for transgender adults that age is nearly twice as high, at 23.5 percent.

Another fact: People who experience homelessness at younger ages are more likely to be chronically homeless throughout their lives.

Want another? The Trevor Project, a suicide-prevention nonprofit for LGBTQ+ youth, reports that LGBTQ+ youth who reported housing instability and homelessness are more than twice as likely to report depression, and nearly four times as likely to attempt suicide as those who did not experience housing instability.

In short, outing children to their family can set off a chain reaction of irreparable harm. And that, Kempf says, is a violation of the Texas Education Agency’s code of ethics, which states an educator “shall not intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly treat a student or minor in a manner that adversely affects or endangers the learning, physical health, mental health, or safety of the student or minor.”

And, Kempf notes, “outing a student against their will unfortunately does all of those things.”

The TEA did not respond to a request for comment about how Katy ISD’s actions square with the agency’s policies. Katy ISD’s spokesman, Craig Eichhorn, similarly didn’t respond to my messages.

And their silence speaks volumes.

I asked Kempf if she thinks there’s a possibility that perhaps most of these students’ parents already knew how their child identifies; if perhaps the district didn’t violate TEA policy, because all 19 of these families could, theoretically, be supportive.

According to the Trevor Project, 57 percent of parents would be comfortable if their child came out as transgender or nonbinary. That’s higher than I expected, to be honest. But it still means that more than 40 percent of parents would not be comfortable.

“Logistically, I don’t see how it’s possible for the school district to be able to know with the required level of certainty that outing a student will not lead to abuse or neglect or other forms of harm in the home,” Kempf says. “There’s just no way of knowing that in advance of making a disclosure like this, which is why we believe that the policy as written is in violation of the law, no matter how it’s enforced.”

Yes, the law. The ACLU contends that forced outings of children to their parents is a violation of students’ privacy rights.

“It’s a risk, coming out to anybody,” says Carrie Rai, the executive director of Tony’s Place, a nonprofit resource center for LGBTQ+ youth, based in Montrose. “They come out in their trusted safe space, and I can’t tell you what that safe space is to an individual, because it’s different for each person. And it should be that individual’s choice.”

Tony’s Place is what Rai calls a “safe haven” for LGBTQ+ youth under the age of 25, where they can come in to eat a hot meal, do laundry, find gender-affirming clothing, shower and work with case managers. Most of the youth are homeless, unstably housed or unsafely housed, Rai says. And, Rai says, “family rejection is the number one reason” the youth she works with find themselves without a safe and stable place to call home.

It’s not immediately clear if Katy ISD is the first school district in the state to forcibly out students. With more than 1,200 districts across Texas, Kempf says the ACLU can’t be certain of such a superlative. But she does know that it’s the state’s largest district to take such action. The same week Katy ISD passed its policy, California’s attorney general sued a school district outside Los Angeles in an attempt to block the district from acting on a similar policy that had recently passed.

That’s not going to happen here in Texas, where the state’s leadership has been nothing short of hostile to transgender youth. In the past couple years alone, the state legislature has limited life-saving, gender-affirming health care options for transgender youth and limited their ability to play sports. At the same time, a wave of book bans have removed representative stories from school shelves – including in Katy.

“This is bullying, masquerading as policy – targeting an already-marginalized group of young people in the state, and making their lives even worse,” says Kempf. “Essentially every aspect of life, of being a kid, and being a successful and healthy student is under attack.”

The act of outing kids is just the latest step in a forced march of cruelty.

The fact that this happened to 19 children violates more than just ethics codes and laws. It violates a fundamental human code of what it means to be good and decent. Even if Katy ISD had only sent home one notification these past two months, that would have been one too many.

Share your Houston stories with Maggie Gordon. Start on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Or you can email her at maggie@houstonlanding.org.

Mental health is the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths. So how do we fix it?

In 2019, 63 Texas women died from causes related to pregnancy. One in four of those deaths was related to a mental health condition — making maternal mental health the leading cause of death for those women, according to new data released last week by the Texas Department of State Health Statistics.

So what are we doing about it?

“We need a lot more money, advocacy and care,” says Jasmine Roussell, the administrator at a collective of six Texas birthing and parenting organizations called the Maternal Health Equity Collaborative. Roussell is “nose deep in the data,” including the new report released last week by the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee; she’s also a certified doula who was struck during her training several years ago by the subpar state of birthing here in Texas.

“It was jarring because I was expecting to learn about babies,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting to learn that here in the United States, where we should have access to every resource, that we have some of the worst maternal and infant mortality rates in the world.”

And here in Texas, the share of women who die due to pregnancy-related causes is among the worst in our nation. The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that across the U.S., 23.5 women died per 100,000 live births between 2018 and 2021; in Texas, the rate was 28.1 per 100,000. (It’s important to note that this data, as well as the new state numbers, comes from before the passage of SB8 in 2021, which banned abortions as early as five weeks into a pregnancy, a move that has had significant impacts on maternal health — the true reach of which is not yet known.)

In Houston, home of the world’s largest medical center, it’s tempting to think we might be an exception to these dismal numbers.

We’re not.

“In Harris County, and in Houston, March of Dimes gave both the city and the county an F letter grade in our most recent report,” says Alicia Lee, the Houston area’s director of collective impact for the March of Dimes.

That report specifically examined Houston’s preterm birth rate, revealing that one in eight babies born in the Houston area are born before 37 weeks of gestation, which Lee describes as “a leading indicator” for maternal health and mortality. “Houston by no means has the highest rate,” Lee notes, “but we do have a rating that is abysmal.”

It’s impossible to ignore that our local ratings are unforgivably unequal: The new state data shows Black women die about 1.5 times as frequently as white women due to pregnancy-related issues. And while Latina women are actually less likely to die than white women, Latinas are seeing their rates increase, even as the rates for white and Black women decreased slightly between 2013 and 2019.

The reasons for this are multi-layered and complicated. But in many ways, they’re also simple:

“This is systemic racism, and you’re not going to fix that overnight,” says Kay Matthews, the executive director and founder of Shades of Blue, a maternal mental health focused nonprofit organization based in Houston. “You have to address it and call it what it is.”

Kay Matthews, the executive director and founder of Shades of Blue, a maternal mental health focused nonprofit organization based in Houston, shows a closet filled with resources for newborns and parents, Tuesday, July 25, 2023, in Houston. (Marie D. De Jesús / Houston Landing)

It’s well documented that the physical pain of women of color is often discounted and discredited by doctors. It’s also well documented that the share of doctors who are women of color is nowhere near high enough to be truly representative of our nation’s population. And of course, it’s well documented that women of color are more likely to experience other “social determinants of health” — those environmental conditions of the places where we live, learn, work, etc., that can affect one’s health outcomes — that are linked to lower health care access.

In short, it’s well documented that Matthews speaks an infuriating truth here. Not just about the conditions that lead to numbers like those dropped by the DSHS last week, but also about the fact that we’re “not going to fix that overnight.”

So how do you solve a complex problem like this? Matthews has an idea for that.

“The reality is understanding and calling out what’s happening in our systems is how we’re going to change it,” she says. “Doing this work is tiresome, but it’s necessary. In a system that continues to create these barriers, talking about it, having conversations about it, and continuing to bring it to the forefront is the only way it’s going to change.”

That’s hard to do — especially on topics surrounding mental health, which is wrapped in a cocoon of stigma. It can be even harder when discussing that topic during the postpartum period, which I found to be the most isolating few months of my entire life.

A room designated for healing at the Shades of Blue nonprofit, Tuesday, July 25, 2023, in Houston. (Marie D. De Jesús / Houston Landing)

In the months before a woman in Texas has a child, she’s inundated with doctor’s visits — as she should be. During my high-risk pregnancy a couple years ago, I averaged about an appointment a week as I neared my due date. Then I had my daughter. I was discharged from the hospital a little more than 48 hours after my delivery, and told to follow up with my obstetrician at the six-week mark for an all-clear. That was it.

In the first few weeks of my daughter’s life, my husband and I schlepped her back and forth to countless doctor’s appointments. Every time we checked in at the pediatrician, I was handed a clipboard with a faded, greyscale photocopied piece of paper, asking me to self-identify whether I felt sad or overwhelmed more often than usual. I’d check the “yes” box, only to learn it was an exercise in futility.

I recounted all of this the other day, while chatting with a friend who is pregnant. I told her how after nearly 10 months of feeling medically monitored during my pregnancy, I felt “invisible” and “like I didn’t exist” after my daughter’s birth. In turn, my friend told me that another friend of hers had just described that period of time the exact same way.

That talk with my friend was the first time I’d ever really said that out loud. And in that very first admission, I’d learned that the revelation I’d been afraid to give voice to was a shared experience.

It goes even deeper than me and a friend of a friend.

“Mental health is the No. 1 pregnancy-related morbidity,” says Amy Raines-Milenkov, an associate professor in the department of pediatrics and women’s health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth, and a member of the DSHS’s review committee that released its findings last week. “I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the postpartum period. There’s so many visits prenatal — and sometimes it even seems too many when you’re in it — but then in the postpartum period, you’re dropped.”

We need to fix that, she says. And yet, “in Texas there hasn’t seemed to be any kind of will to address that,” Raines-Milenkov says.

So what can we do? How can we work to save mothers who are dying preventable deaths? How can we solve a problem that, as Raines-Milenkov says, “is an indicator of the position of women in our society”? I see tangible solutions, like instituting requirements for postpartum check-ins that allow a mother to feel medical support during this period of time. But that feels like a castle in the sky. And we need a foundation.

We need to start simply, by elevating the conversation around postpartum health, and especially around postpartum mental health. Let’s use our words to pierce the bubble of isolation that so many feel enveloped in.

“The more conversations we’re having out loud, the more we’re going to change the outcomes,” says Matthews.

Share your Houston stories with me. We can start on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Or you can email me at maggie@houstonlanding.org.

This article first appeared on Houston Landing and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.