Parents plan boycott over Pride Day at L.A. elementary school

Outraged conservative parents at an L.A. elementary school say they plan to keep their children home on the school’s Pride Day to protest the school teaching students about gay parents.

A group of parents at the North Hollywood kindergarten-through-5th-grade Saticoy Elementary School launched an Instagram page about a week ago calling out the school’s administration and urging other parents to keep their children home on June 2, the day the school plans to hold its Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly, according to the page.

“Keep your kids home and innocent,” says a flier posted by the group, Saticoy Elementary Parents. “Videos will be shown to the students including one where it says, ‘some kids have 2 mommies, some have 2 daddies’. This has caused outrage among parents.”

“We said no to COVID-19 vaccines and it’s now over. It was a hard fought battle and we won! Now it is time to say stop grooming our children,” the group wrote in another Instagram post.

It is not clear how many parents may participate in the boycott but a protest has been scheduled at the school at 8 a.m. on June 2.

The school’s principal, Maria Awakian, who has been a target of the parents’ ire, declined to comment when reached by The Times on Wednesday.

In a statement, the Los Angeles Unified School District said it remains committed to “creating a safe and inclusive learning environment that embraces the diversity of the communities we serve.”

“As part of our engagement with school communities, our schools regularly discuss the diversity of the families that we serve and the importance of inclusion,” the statement said. “This remains an active discussion with our school communities and we remain committed to continuing to engage with families about this important topic.”

The protests come as part of a national conservative movement against discussing sexuality in grade school. The movement includes concerns among some parents over trans students using bathrooms that don’t adhere to the gender they were assigned at birth.

The parental backlash at Saticoy Elementary is happening at the same time the Dodgers are facing objections from conservative Catholics over the baseball team’s decision to invite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBTQ+ charity group whose members dress in drag as nuns, to its LGBTQ+ Pride Night.

The Dodgers uninvited the group, then reinvited them after a backlash from LGBTQ+ advocacy and community groups, fans and politicians.