By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools must allow parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ instruction that conflicts with their religious beliefs, BJ and Brecken Jones sat quietly in their living room—stunned, relieved and vindicated.
“For years, we were treated like extremists for simply protecting our kids,” BJ said. “Now the Supreme Court says we were right all along.”
For this Boulder County family, Mahmoud v. Taylor wasn’t just a legal case—it was a mirror.
Reading the Court’s opinion, BJ and Brecken saw their own experience reflected almost line for line.
What they didn’t expect was that their quiet effort to opt out—rejected by school officials, scorned by activists and ultimately buried in district archives—would one day echo from the highest court in the country.
The flashpoint: A lesson they never saw coming
BJ and Brecken didn’t expect controversy when they enrolled their daughter in first grade at Superior Elementary in Boulder Valley School District. But in 2018, they received word that the school would be observing Transgender Awareness Week with a series of presentations and in-class lessons.
Brecken stayed home with their children during Transgender Awareness Week, but she sent BJ into the classroom to see what was happening for himself.
What they learned shocked them.
“They played an activist YouTube video called Queer Kid Stuff… all with a talking teddy bear and cute jingles,” BJ recalled. “Very radical material, advocating for boys to wear dresses, kids to choose their own gender.”
The teacher then instructed students to pick their gender—he, she or they—and share it with a partner.
“My daughter was 6 years old, and they were asking kids in class to choose their gender. It felt very manipulative,” he said.
After the lesson, students were escorted to the auditorium for a live performance by a transgender activist theater group.
“In the musical, a girl bird didn’t want to be a girl anymore,” BJ said. “She goes to see Dr. Squirrel, who magically converts her into a boy on stage—and all the other birds cheer.”
Auditorium photo from the transgender-themed musical
“We immediately began to wonder—if this is what they’re teaching in first grade, what else are they doing?” she said.
Classroom photo of students watching Queer Kid Stuff video
The denial: Policy promises–broken
The Joneses figured opting out of these types of lessons would be straightforward. Under both BVSD policy and Colorado law, parents have the right to excuse their kids from any part of comprehensive health education—including sexuality content—if it goes against their beliefs.
But soon after they made the request, the school replied with a flat out refusal.
District letter denying the opt-out request
“Unfortunately, we are not able to accommodate your request to proactively opt-out your students from [transgender] topics that might be offensive to your religious beliefs,” the letter stated.
The language stunned them. Not only was the school refusing to accommodate a religious concern—it was doing so despite its own rules.
Brecken pointed to the contradiction.
“You would think it would be pretty easy not to promote transgenderism to elementary age students,” she said. “However, their response confirmed that transgender propaganda is everywhere and they were clearly unwilling to honor our legal rights.”
BJ asserted that they weren’t trying to argue with what others believe. It was about having the space to live by their beliefs too. And their right as a family to say, “not for our child.”
“We asked our school for our children to be left out of these sexuality lessons,” he said. “This is our right under policy and under state law, but because it was transgender, they would not allow it.”
According to the Joneses, the school argued that the content didn’t fall under health education at all because it was framed as part of an “anti-bullying” program—even though the lessons were sexual in nature.
BVSD health education policy stating parents’ right to exclude children from religiously objectionable instruction
The backlash: Booed, doxxed and publicly shamed
After filing a formal complaint with the district, the Joneses expected due process. What they received instead was a wave of hostility—first from the school board, then from activists, then from the local media.
A CORA request later revealed internal emails confirming that a redacted copy of their private discrimination complaint—protected under federal FERPA law—had been forwarded by BVSD’s communications director to a reporter at the Daily Camera. The leak occurred after the Joneses first spoke publicly but two weeks before their case was scheduled to be heard at the next board meeting.
Email showing Randy Barber admitting he sent the redacted complaint to the press
“Top district officials leaked our private documents to the press the day before our appeal was to be heard by the school board,” BJ said.
What followed was a boardroom unlike anything the Joneses had ever seen.
“We were mobbed by over 120 activists, including people from the ACLU, Out Boulder, and the local health department,” Brecken said. “They jeered. They booed. They sneered. But most of all, they came to bully us because we wanted our 6-year-old to be protected from age-inappropriate transgender material.”
Crowd holding signs at BVSD board meeting
The meeting was supposed to be about their legal right to opt out. Instead, Brecken said, it became a public trial of their family’s faith.
Board members offered no apology. They doubled down instead. One later compared objecting families to white supremacists and xenophobes. Another said she “felt sorry” for a child who testified in favor of religious opt-outs, wondering aloud if the girl had merely been parroting her parents’ “dogma.”
“This incident shook our family to the core,” BJ said. “We didn’t want to homeschool. We just felt backed into a corner.”
They made the hard decision to withdraw their children and homeschool instead.
“We had to completely reorient our lives,” Brecken added. “But we did it because we knew what was at stake.”
The ideological blueprint: ‘Queering the classroom’ by design
Before making that decision, the Joneses took a closer look—and what they found convinced them this wasn’t just a one-time lesson, but part of something bigger.
“We found out that BVSD pays an activist group called A Queer Endeavor to push a covert operation called ‘queering the classroom,’” Brecken said. “They teach teachers how to intentionally weave sexuality topics into normal everyday curriculum, like math problems, essay prompts and even PE.”
Publicly available training materials confirm that assertion. The group, based out of the University of Colorado Boulder, describes its mission as working toward “systemic change” by embedding LGBTQ+ perspectives into every corner of school life—not just health class.
A Queer Endeavor slide stating its approach moves “beyond the anti-bullying discourse and works toward systemic change”
In one training guide titled Breaking the Silence, used by educators in Colorado and nationwide, A Queer Endeavor tells teachers how to respond to pushback from parents—and discourages any accommodation.
“We strongly encourage teachers not to comply with that option,” the guide reads, referring to parental opt-out requests.
Page 21 of A Queer Endeavor’s training guide discouraging opt-out compliance
Another slide instructs teachers to “disrupt” cisnormativity, heteronormativity and power hierarchies, posing questions like “Is the gender binary reinforced or challenged by this text?” and “How can you weave queer perspectives into a math lesson?”
Instructional slide on disrupting heteronormativity
To the Joneses, the intent was clear: bypass parents, embed ideology and punish those who resisted.
“They weren’t just teaching tolerance,” BJ said. “They were replacing one belief system with another—and calling our beliefs hateful.”
The Supreme Court decision: A national win, a personal reckoning
On June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 6–3 ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor, holding that public schools cannot force students to participate in LGBTQ+-themed instruction when doing so places a substantial burden on a family’s religious beliefs. The decision echoed the Joneses’ experience in almost every detail.
“It’s not just our win—it’s for all parents of faith who’ve been sidelined, silenced or called names for wanting a say in their children’s education,” Brecken said.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, condemned school policies that deny religious parents the ability to shield their children from worldview-based classroom instruction.
“The government cannot condition the benefit of free public education on parents’ acceptance of such instruction,” Alito wrote (p. 1).
He continued:
“These books present a very real threat of undermining the religious beliefs that parents wish to instill in their children… and the books exert upon children a psychological pressure to conform” (p. 25).
The opinion highlighted instances where school officials encouraged teachers to correct children who expressed dissenting views. According to Alito, instructing a student that his comment is “hurtful” after stating boys can’t become girls constitutes a coercive and unconstitutional burden on that child’s religious development (p. 26).
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion, called the Montgomery County curriculum “an impermissible attempt to standardize the views of students” and warned that schools were adopting new ideological programs without historical precedent or religious accommodation (p. 10).
BJ and Brecken said they were stunned by how directly the ruling mirrored what had happened in their own district.
“The Court said it’s unconstitutional to tell a 6-year-old her faith is hurtful. That’s what happened to us,” BJ said. Brecken agreed.
“We weren’t trying to ban books. We were just trying to opt out, quietly. And for that, they called us hateful. That’s what this decision changes—it says we’re not alone, and we’re not wrong.”
In a July 3 Denver Post column, Brecken and BJ stated the ruling is “a crucial win for religious liberty and a victory for true inclusivity by expecting that religious families’ beliefs don’t stop at the classroom door.” And a “very personal win” for their family as well.
The Court also dismissed arguments that religious families should just leave the public system. As Alito wrote:
“It is both insulting and legally unsound to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faiths” (p. 20).
For Colorado families, the Joneses said the implications are immediate.
“Colorado schools don’t get a pass just because this happened in Maryland,” Brecken said. “This ruling applies nationwide. They can’t pretend anymore.”
Final reflection: What this was always about
For BJ and Brecken Jones, the Supreme Court ruling did more than validate a legal argument. It confirmed something far deeper—that their faith, their parenting and their quiet request for respect never deserved the backlash they received.
“We cannot continue allowing educators to treat families like ours with such hostility,” Brecken said. “These are our children. We should be allowed to stand up and say something without being bullied and doxxed into silence.”
It wasn’t said with anger–but resolve.
Since leaving Boulder Valley School District, the Joneses say their children are thriving. Their daughter, now homeschooled, reads five grades above level, is a year ahead in math and ranked in the 98th percentile on standardized testing this year.
“They’re more confident,” Brecken said. “They’re not constantly second-guessing what they can say in class or whether their faith is going to be seen as wrong.”
BJ said homeschooling has brought more unity to their home. “We know what they’re learning, and it aligns with what we believe,” he said.
But they still hear from families across Colorado—some too afraid to speak, others too weary to fight.
BJ said the lesson isn’t about politics or power. It’s about restoring the relationship between parents and public institutions.
“We were never trying to shut anything down,” he said. “We just wanted to be left out. That’s what real inclusion looks like—letting people live by their beliefs without punishing them for it.”
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the highest court in the land agreed.
And now, as Colorado schools revisit their policies in the wake of that ruling, the Joneses hope they’ll finally do what the district failed to do back then—listen.