A Virginia teacher is celebrating victory after fighting back over the claim she was “asked to lie to parents about their own children.”
Deb Figliola, a middle school teacher, told CBN News she felt compelled to take a stand after the Harrisonburg City Public School Board reportedly created a new policy she believes upended parents’ rights.
“A little over three years ago, we were given a training that told us as a staff—and this training was given to all staff and all personnel within the school district—that we would have to ask students for what they wanted to be called and what pronoun they preferred,” she said. “And then we had to always refer to them that way.”
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Beyond that, Figliola said teachers were told not to tell parents about the use of these pronouns. She said she took issue with the policy and the district, where she has been teaching for more than a decade.
“When I heard that training, I basically went back to my office, my classroom, and wrote … down some thoughts,” she said. “I still have the paper and I just wrote, ‘I can’t lie. I’m not going to lie to kids and I’m not going to lie to parents.’”
According to Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal advocacy group, the school district decided before the 2021-2022 school year to add “gender identity” to its nondiscrimination policy.
“It then developed and issued guidance that detailed new requirements related to students and parents that teachers were told to ‘immediately implement,’” ADF noted in a statement. “These new requirements included the directive that HCPS staff must ask for and use any name or pronoun a student requests, even if inconsistent with the student’s sex. It also required staff to hide such requests from parents unless HCPS employees determined the child’s parents were sufficiently ‘supportive’ of their child’s ‘transition.’”
Figliola teamed up with ADF and decided to join two other educators in pushing back.
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Reprinted with permission from faithwire.com. Copyright © 2025 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.
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