FWAFA uproar
Board of arts magnet charter school requires ‘unaltered’ birth certificates for students auditioning for choirs TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editornash@dallasvoice.com The board of an arts magnet charter school in Fort Worth last week voted to change the school’s handbook to define “boy” and “girl” based on the gender markers on a child’s original birth certificate and to require students auditioning for the school’s two well-known choirs, The Texas Boys Choir and The Singing Girls of Texas, to show their birth certificates as proof of their “biological sex.” The vote comes after a gender nonconforming student auditioned for Fort Worth Academy of Fine Arts’ Singing Girls of Texas Choir and despite the fact that the majority of parents of the school’s students opposed the change. (The child’s mother, referred to here as T, asked that neither her nor her child’s name be used to protect their safety.
The child will be referred to as P.) T said that the board had circulated a survey asking for input from staff and parents, but that the survey had been created to deliberately cater to “right-wing” sentiment.
She said the board had initially asked administrators to create the survey but were unhappy with the results. They then commissioned an outside source to create a survey but were again unhappy with the results, so they created their own. “It was a witch hunt,” she said of the survey. “They did not ask questions in a neutral way.
And they asked about all kinds of other things that weren’t relevant — critical race theory, pornography in books allowed at the school.
