[Puffer Fish]

What do you think? Was the school wrong to not tell the family about the bullying so they could try to protect their daughter?
Is the school's decision partly at fault for this?
Should the school be ordered by the court to give the family lots of money?

Bullied trans teen ran away, was sex trafficked after school kept gender transition secret from family

A Virginia high school student ran away from home and was sex-trafficked through multiple states -- in part because her high school failed to tell the child’s parents she identified as a male and was relentlessly bullied for it, a lawsuit alleges.

"They stole my right to protect my daughter," grandmother and adoptive mother Michele Blair told the Washington Examiner of Sage, now 16.

Sage -- who had a troubled childhood and suffered mental health issues -- started attending Appomattox County High School aged 14 on August 10, 2021 where she began identifying as a male, going by male pronouns and a male name and using the male restrooms, according to a lawsuit filed by Michele in Virginia federal court last month.

But despite school staffers being actively involved in Sage's desire to become a boy and knowing about the repeated bullying she suffered, they "deliberately concealed" the gender change and didn’t get her parents involved until it was too late and Sage ran away. She then ended up being raped by multiple men for months in four different states, the suit claims.

Just one day into the school year on August 11, 2021, Sage started getting viciously bullied by boys on her bus that said she looked like a boy, threatened to rape her until she "liked boys", threatened to hold her out of the bus window by her hair unless she apologized and threatened to shoot her, telling her they knew where she lived, the lawsuit alleges.

Virginia school kept teen gender transition secret: suit (nypost.com)

Many schools make it a policy to not reveal information about a child's "gender identity" at school to the child's family, even threatening to disciplinary action against teachers who do not abide by the school policy. In this case, the school could not tell the family about the bullying problems without also revealing to them the reason that the child was being bullied.

[AveMaria02]

In my opinion, a school should not be keeping something like this from parents. Parents have a right to know when their child is struggling with such issues. It's possible that her parents could have helped her in some way.