Teacher who created furor with transgender lesson to 5-year-olds wins top award
A California charter school association gave its highest award to the kindergarten teacher whose transgender lesson last summer without warning parents left some of the 5-year-olds traumatized. The decision of the California Charter Schools Association to name Kaelin Swaney its Teacher of the Year makes it “clear the CCSA does not stand with parents,” says Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute, a pro-family public policy group . “The CCSA should be ashamed of themselves,” England said in a March 27 press release. A teacher at Rocklin Academy Gateway, an elite charter school in the Sacramento suburbs , Swaney touched off a bitter controversy when she read the book “ I am Jazz ” to her students before explaining their classmate, a boy, was now a “girl” and would be called by a girl’s name, England recounted. “I am Jazz” is explicitly pro-transgender and begins: “From the time she was two years old, Jazz knew that she had a girl’s brain in a bo