Brief argues banning transgender, LGBTQ+-family children from universal pre-K is illegal, harmful to children
First Focus on Children has filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in a case that could exclude transgender children and children of LGBTQ+ families from publicly funded universal early education.
In St. Mary Catholic Parish, Littleton, Colorado, et al. v. Roy, the Court will decide whether religious schools receiving public funds through Colorado’s universal pre-kindergarten program can exclude transgender and gender-diverse children as well as children from LGBTQ+ families and still receive public money. The state requires all recipients to follow the non-discrimination requirements written into the universal pre-K statute. First Focus on Children argues that no school in the United States, let alone an institution receiving public money, can legally exclude a child based on their identity or family, and that doing so would harm many different groups of children without benefiting the health or safety of any single child.
“Colorado created its universal pre-K program to serve every four-year-old in the state,” First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley said. “Excluding a child based on who they are or what family they come from is not only illegal, it is damaging and dangerous. The excluded child will certainly suffer, and so will their siblings, who will be subject to stigma and shaming. And for what? Banning these children will saddle them — and, very likely, their siblings — with toxic stress and damaging trauma without benefiting the health or safety of one single child. The Court must keep the focus of this case where it belongs: squarely on the well-being of the children.”
Research has established that excluding children from educational and community settings can contribute to adverse childhood experiences or ACEs, which are uniquely traumatic events demonstrated to harm a child’s health and safety. Children are particularly likely to suffer ACEs when exclusion compounds discrimination, isolation, poverty, or other sources of chronic stress. The science also demonstrates that ACEs and resulting toxic stress can disrupt healthy brain development and increase the risk of physical, mental, educational, and behavioral harms that can last well into adulthood.
Recent research has established that LGBTQ+ youth also experience sexual-and-gender-minority specific ACEs (SGM-ACEs) that compound the harm they already face from a higher rate of traditional ACEs exposure. Courts have increasingly recognized the need to treat childhood trauma and adversity as legally significant in contexts ranging from access to education to criminal sentencing.
The brief also argues that if religious organizations that receive public money are permitted to deny children an education based on identity, they similarly could deny LGBTQ+ people of all ages commonly provided services like disaster relief, food distribution, emergency shelter, affordable housing, health care facilities, child care centers, and senior residences.