Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Thursday morning visited a Pennsylvania school whose policies ban both transgender students and teachers in her annual “back to school” tour promoting taxpayer-funded private education, which she calls “education freedom.”
DeVos once again chose to visit a religious school, the Harrisburg Catholic Elementary School, after which she held a roundtable (video below). For decades DeVos has devoted her professional life to finding ways to make taxpayers pay for private education. Since becoming Education Secretary DeVos has heightened her focus, politicizing her agency to promote private and charter schools over public schools, and working to further marginalize minority students, especially LGBTQ, Black, and disabled children.
As The Huffington Post and CNN report, Harrisburg Elementary School bans transgender students and teachers who have or have begun transitioning. The diocese which oversees the school has a school policy that says to “attempt to make accommodations for such persons would be to cooperate in the immoral action and impose an unacceptable burden on others in the school community.”
That same policy warns parents that by enrolling their children in the school “they agree that they will not publically [sic] act in opposition to Catholic teaching.”
DeVos politicized her visit in a press release, attacking Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Tom Wolf for vetoing a bill that would have doubled the $210 million in taxpayer funds used to subsidize a program granting tax credits to help funnel money into private and charter schools, and effectively out of the public schools system statewide.
Here’s DeVos today at her roundtable pushing her program to increase taxpayer-funded private, religious, and charter schools, while blasting Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor:
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