To the editor:

I wish to respond to an issue Lindsay Hutter tucked into her letter in the March 16 Alexandria Times about National Merit honors as an example of a supposed “woke agenda” in the public schools. The specific issue is her complaint about teachers not telling parents when they learn a student considers themselves to be transgendered.

I partially agree with her concern. It is truly sad that a teenager would have more trust in a schoolteacher than in their own parents. However, the solution surely isn’t to demand that teachers violate that trust, but rather for parents to have already earned it.

It seems to me that parents who are the “last to learn” such information about their child are probably the type of parents the child has good reason to distrust.