In the 1965 movie “Flight of the Phoenix,” the survivors of a plane crash in the Sahara make a new plane from the old one and fly it out of the desert. It was ten years ago this fall that I went to the new director of the Fort Worden Public Development Authority (PDA) and suggested that he needed a similar strategy for it to “fly” financially. Little did I realize then that it would take so long to crash and that the failure would begin so immediately.
Cleared For Takeoff
The PDA was an independent public agency set up by the City of Port Townsend with its own board of directors appointed by the city. Former city manager David Timmons put former planning director Dave Robison in charge of negotiating the transfer of Fort Worden from state government to the PDA. Robison, perhaps because he was eager to get the PDA director job, agreed to an onerous deal: that besides operating the core buildings, the PDA would also, in several years, take over the maintenance of dozens of old and unneeded buildings.
Using the “Flight of the Phoenix” analogy, I proposed to Robison that I would help him get a grant from state government to create a business and investment plan for financial sustainability. I believe that the PDA used about two-thirds of the grant for preparation of a site plan later used to justify glamping and Makers Square. The PDA had already begun to fail.
Not Enough Lift
Even with a greatly-reduced budget for the business and investment plan, I still took a deep dive into the numbers, analyzing where visitors came from, reconstructing the accounting statements to determine the relative profitability of different departments, and profiling competitors which went after the same group business.
I found big problems in the operations: that the accounting systems were almost useless for making management decisions about day-to-day operations and that the margins on those operations were grossly out of line with industry averages. The margins on the rooms, for example, which provide the bulk of operating cash flow for almost all hotel operations, were half the industry averages, and food and beverage operations were a negative 15 to 20 percent, and not near zero as they should have been. Overhead was twice the industry average.
Besides the management and accounting problems, I found two big problems with the property itself that meant that without substantial and carefully targeted investment, the PDA would never be able to improve the buildings, much less maintain dozens that were unnecessary.
First, there simply weren’t enough salable beds that with good margins would generate cash flow. The engine in the plane simply did not have enough cylinders. Barracks that could have been renovated to generate cash flow were given away to Peninsula College or left unused.
Second, there was nothing to do on rainy days at the Fort and there were no quality meeting rooms, which meant that the PDA could not sell off-season. I recommended good AV equipment, rainy-day amenities, and covered picnic shelters with fireplaces on the bluff where families could make memories together.
Flights of Fancy
Pétanque court installed on back lot.
My recommendations fell on deaf ears, for the new model for the Fort already seemed fixed: McMenamins hotels, which are targeted at adults who spend much of their stay eating and drinking. Close to a million dollars went into converting an old brig into a bar, and a new pétanque court went in on a back lot. The lowest cost for an individual booking soared to hundreds of dollars per night.
Using grants, donations, and a big loan from Kitsap Bank, the PDA put the big money into glamping and Makers Square, both fads of the time. Those projects not only distracted the board and staff from essential operational and accounting improvements, but used up the financial capacity for additional lodging, the financial necessity.
Interestingly, the PDA did hire consultants to prepare pro formas for glamping and Makers Square, but they were designers, not business people, and they made unrealistic or bad assumptions. For example, the pro forma for Makers Square projected that it would barely break even, but would justify itself by increasing room sales. The problem is that most of those sales would come in the peak season when those rooms were already sold. The cost overruns on glamping speak for themselves.
The $2 million glamping project featured these “luxury” tent sites projected to cost $125,000 each. Installations were never completed and though their expected life is ten years, only a few years post-installation the unused tents are already deteriorating.
Moral Hazards, But No Control Tower
The high and unpayable debt resulting from glamping and Makers Square highlights a moral hazard in state law: cities can set up PDAs that may benefit them, but they are not liable for the debt they may take on. This encourages them to take risks for which they do not bear the consequences.
Had the city been responsible for the PDA’s debts, it might have paid more attention to the original deal that made the PDA responsible for maintaining all those old buildings. It might have commissioned a detailed business and investment strategy before closing on a deal. It would have hired experienced professionals to review new debt. And it would have made sure that the PDA board was doing its job.
A board’s primary responsibility is to hire and fire the executive director, to make sure that director is doing their job. The PDA board had too many retired professionals unwilling to be independent and put in the necessary review time. One spent much of his time doing building inspections. I wrote another with an impressive background in finance and the travel industry about my concerns for the PDA’s viability. They did not respond.
In 2021 the board pushed out long-time director Robison, but not without considerable angst about its reputation. A 3/18/21 Port Townsend Leaderarticle quoted an email from board treasurer Jeff Jackson saying, “I get we’re transitioning but not fast or clear enough and the three of us look partially ineffective.” That article quotes a press release from co-chairs Todd Hutton and Norm Tonina saying that Robison’s tenure was, “Ending on a high note.”
Rearranging the Flight Deck
Management blamed the PDA’s crash on Covid, but conditions were already precarious. The embezzlement and diversion of funds took time to clean up after, but there does not seem to have been a plan for how to repay the restructured debt. It is anybody’s guess why the PDA spun hospitality operations out into a separate entity when those operations didn’t make money in the first place.
Fort Worden will now go back to the state, which, with its budget challenges, probably won’t maintain buildings even at current minimal levels, much less improve them. Don’t expect a big turnaround in operations, for the state had no real business strategy when it previously operated the buildings. Fortunately, core users like Centrum provide a base of business, but all those long-term questions about how to compete and sell off-season room nights will still exist.
A Way Forward
For decades now there have been kumbaya retreats at Fort Worden about the meaning of “lifelong learning.” This misdirection resulted in a lack of focus on the improvement of day-to-day operations, which brought the Fort and the PDA to where they are today. There are ways of improving this property such that it would be financially self-supporting. However, the big challenge isn’t the business operation of the Fort — it is its governance.
Simply put, does the community care enough about the Fort Worden complex to put the right people in charge? The experience with the pool and the PDA show that city government is not up to this task, but another form of governance could work if there was enough of the community watching out for its future.
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PHOTOS: Stephen Schumacher
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Earlier Port Townsend Free Press reporting on the Fort Worden PDA:
Jefferson County Public Health exposed sensitive patient data to worldwide view for three years due to accidental misconfiguration of its Tableau visual analytics platform hosted in the cloud and offered on its website.
This breach of confidential patient information offers lessons on the insecurity of cloud data storage, even as the City of Port Townsend just migrated its finances to a Tableau-integrated cloud system.
Perhaps more significantly, it also exposes some of the ways Public Health may be promoting false narratives by withholding, distorting, and cherry-picking its data disclosures.
Data Leak Raises Questions about Public Health Messaging
The data leak opened a revealing window into the questionable data sources that Public Health has used to justify its narrative that COVID-19 is “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
Compare that CDC messaging, promoted by Public Health, to the reality of Jefferson County COVID-19 deaths age 65 or older revealed in this anonymized summary (from the leaked Tableau screenshot of county deaths as of April 19, 2023):
Jefferson County COVID-19 deaths age 65 or older. Exact ages have been redacted to preserve anonymity.
The Vaccination Status was “None” for only seven out of the 30 county COVID-19 deaths in this dataset. The other 77% were fully vaccinated or boosted or twice boosted, but hardly protected from infection, hospitalization, and death.
Note that two of the unvaccinated deaths were in 2020 before vaccines were available, while the other five “None” deaths might NOT actually have been unvaccinated, since Public Health may mark Vaccination Status as “None” if:
1. Vaccination took place in a pharmacy, supermarket, or other location not sharing records with Jefferson Healthcare;
These statistical shell games also apply to the seven county COVID-19 deaths aged 55 to 64, only one of whom had “Primary Series Completed,” since it is unknown how many of the other six deaths were vaccinated one or more times in ways that Public Health has chosen not to count.
Another point to note about the leaked age 65+ dataset is that 23 out of 29 (not counting one death marked “Unknown”) were known to have serious Health Conditions including cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, and diabetes.
That 23 includes two of the “Unvaccinated” misidentified as “Null” under Health Conditions, whereas one was chronically ill in hospice and the other was hospitalized for multiple serious comorbidities and surgical complications unrelated to COVID-19. The other six “Null” deaths also likely had various health conditions judging from their case notes.
Given their precarious conditions, an unknown number may not actually have died “from” COVID-19, instead merely “with” a COVID-19 diagnosis stemming from an unreliable PCR test result. For example, the case notes say one of these supposed COVID-19 deaths actually “died of cancer. Hx heart block, chronic resp. failure.”
So nearly all the county’s supposed COVID-19 deaths age 65+ were likely suffering from an average of four other serious health conditions that might really have killed them.
And at least 77% of them received multiple vaccine injections — increasingly a pandemic of the vaccinated as the last 8 deaths in the leaked data (from May 2022 to April 2023) were vaccinated, including one boosted and two boosted twice:
Leaked data reveals that May 2022 to April 2023, all supposed Covid-19 deaths recorded in Jefferson County were vaccinated individuals, contrary to Public Health disinformation.
That’s a very different picture than what Public Health messaging represented to the public, categorizing all but three of these 30 deaths simply as “Not up to date” or “Unvaccinated” to justify deadly lockdowns, mandates, endless boosters, and vaccine discrimination.
How County Patient Data Was Exposed in the Cloud
Throughout much of the lockdown era, Jefferson Public Health maintained COVID-19 Updates on its website:
The updates regularly posted charts showing county COVID-19 case rates, hospitalizations, and deaths, generated by Tableau software based on COVID-19 patient details uploaded to the cloud by Public Health:
These charts included a Tableau menu bar in the bottom-right corners. Hovering the cursor over the down-arrow-box icon offered a live option to “Download” the underlying patient data in various file formats:
This screen shot shows the live option to “Download” underlying patient data which should have been private.
Tableau offered access to confidential patient data and case information either using its web app or downloaded as a “Tableau Workbook” for later offline study using its free-trial Tableau Public desktop app:
Here is what one of these Public Health charts looked like when opened as a Workbook inside the Tableau app:
… along with an easier-to-read zoomed version:
Underlying each chart are tables filled with private patient data in dozens of categories including First/Last Name, Admit/Discharge/Death Date, Age Group, Health Conditions, Vaccination Status, and Case Notes, accessible simply by right-clicking on a chart and selecting “View Data”:
Finally, here is a Tableau table showing specific examples of the private patient data that Public Health exposed on the internet about county deaths involving COVID-19:
Blue areas have been redacted for this article to preserve anonymity.
Note that I redacted this screenshot to block out identifying information such as names to preserve anonymity, but other details are shown to allow verification and indicate the nature and scope of the data leak.
This table represents only a small part of the patient data that Public Health exposed to the web via multiple insecure Tableau charts uploaded throughout 2022. Such data is required to be kept private according to HIPAA Privacy Rules, but Public Health assumed was safe to store in the cloud.
None of this data was obtained by “hacking” or any nefarious activity. Instead, a sharp-eyed Port Townsend Free Press reader stumbled on the “Download” invitations beneath Jefferson Public Health web charts, followed the instructions provided by Tableau, and discovered the trove of patient data being freely offered to all comers.
This reader contacted me, then I verified the information and took the above screenshots back in 2022 for possible use in future stories.
Was Jefferson Public Health Alone in its Data Leak?
Tableau pioneered “visualizing a pandemic defined by data” so was adopted by many county and state Public Health websites to provide a scientific-seeming veneer for their propaganda messaging (as documented October 23 by Congress).
In late 2022 when I surveyed various northwest health department Tableau-based websites, I noticed that some — like Oregon Health Authority — excluded access to underlying chart data, instead just allowing the charts themselves to be downloaded in various formats such as an “Image” or “PDF”:
Others were similar to Jefferson County Public Health in that they enabled “Download” access to their underlying data. For example, Clark County Public Health likewise allowed anyone in the world to dive deeply into its COVID-19 case and death numbers:
Similarly, Washington State Department of Health webpages continue to this day to enable free access to underlying “Data” via the “Download” icon on its Tableau menu bars:
Where Washington State, Clark County, and other Public Health departments differ from Jefferson County is that they were prudent enough to upload only anonymous general statistical data to the cloud.
By contrast, Jefferson County Public Health was the only one I found shoveling easily-identifiable confidential patient data to the cloud — complete with names, dates, health conditions, case notes, pretty much everything. By doing so, it is potentially subject to HIPAA penalties for its negligent practices and risk assessment failures.
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Along these lines, when Jefferson Healthcare received a Public Records Request (PRR) about the vaccination status of a county COVID-19 death, it refused the request on April 27, 2021 “because the individual could be identified from the information and is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) patient privacy laws.”
Then when a follow-up PRR asked for unidentifiable death statistics instead, Jefferson Healthcare pivoted on May 6, 2021 replying: “We have checked with our data analyst team and they report that we do not have reports or documents/records that would address the information you have requested above.” That claim is disingenuous given there were then only three such deaths, so it would have taken their “data analyst team” just a few minutes to provide the requested information.
Public Health proceeded to keep unidentifiable data about COVID-19 cases under wraps on privacy pretexts, even while negligently spilling identifiable data to the cloud and cherry-picking data in media and meeting statements to spin prejudicial vaccination narratives.
For example, at a County Commissioners meeting on December 13, 2021, Public Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry had it both ways saying she “can’t confirm or deny any individual patient’s experience” due to “very stringent rules around patient privacy,” but went on to claim “what we do know” is that the “long-term disability” experienced by an individual patient is “truly false” — gaslighting a 27-year-old Port Townsend resident who had gone on record with documentary evidence from Virginia Mason that she had two heart attacks and 70% loss of function caused by COVID-19 vaccination.
Jefferson Data Continued to Leak for Three Years Until Today
When public health departments around the country stopped updating their data dashboards in early 2023, Jefferson County likewise stopped updating its COVID-19 data charts, then removed them from county webpages soon afterwards. So I assumed its year of spilling patient data was a thing of the past and water under the bridge, no longer an ongoing HIPAA violation of patient privacy.
But while wrapping up this story, I was surprised to learn at least ten of Jefferson Public Health’s Tableau charts were still live and leaking until the present day on the county’s cloud repository at public.tableau.com for anybody to “download or make a copy for inspiration”:
Patient data updated April 19, 2023 was still offered for download as a “Tableau Workbook” for offline study using the free Tableau Public trial app. My app from 2022 opened the data immediately despite being unused for over two years and its trial period long expired:
Example of Tableau charts still offering data in November 2024 before article publication (now visualizing arbitrary “up to date” distinction instead of booster status)
Moreover, patient data was still exposed to viewing on the web even without the Tableau Public app, just by clicking the upper-right “Make a copy” icon, signing into a free Tableau account, and right-clicking “View Data” on any chart:
“View Data” option allowed confidential information to be exposed on any chart.
Same as in 2022, Tableau’s county cloud repository offered a choice of what personal patient data fields to show, including “Sex at birth,” “ZIP code or Tribe,” and a new category “Vaccination status simple” introduced by Public Health to obscure the large number of so-called breakthrough infections by reclassifying vaccinated and boosted individuals as “Not up to date”:
Jefferson County Public Health was informed about its data-leaking web charts so they could be removed from Tableau’s cloud repository prior to this article’s publication. Now that future risk has been removed, hopefully the above historical explanations will serve as a salutary warning for Tableau webmasters about what not to do.
Public Health Responses
Regarding the finding “that all 8 county COVID-19 deaths from May 2022 until data was last updated April 19, 2023 were vaccinated,” I asked Health Officer Dr. Allison Berry:
1. Can you confirm this information?
2. When did Public Health realize that only the vaccinated were dying of COVID-19 in this county since May 2022 until April 2023, and was this fact ever reported to the Board of Health, County Commissioners, and the public?
3. How many unvaccinated and how many vaccinated have died of COVID-19 in this county since April 19, 2023?
Berry replied to these questions as follows:
Thank you for your question. Here is the breakdown of deaths in Jefferson County by vaccination status in recent years. … Since the time when vaccinations were widely available, 48 people have died of COVID-19 in Jefferson County. From May of 2021-the end of that year, we lost 17 people to COVID-19. Of those, 12% were up-to-date on their vaccination, 59% were not up-to-date, and 29% were unvaccinated. In 2022, we lost 14 people to COVID-19. Of those, 14% were up-to-date on their vaccination, 50% were not up-to-date, and 36% were unvaccinated. In 2023, we lost 9 people to COVID-19. Of those, none were up-to-date, 56% were not up-to-date and 44% were unvaccinated. In 2024, so far we have lost 8 people to COVID-19. Of those, 25% were up-to-date, 50% were not up-to-date, and 25% were unvaccinated.
Berry’s figures for 2021 and 2022 match the Tableau numbers precisely, but do not include 3 earlier deaths from 2020 through April 2022 (which may have been reclassified or ignored because they preceded the vaccination program). Her figures also enable calculating there have been 6 unvaccinated and 9 vaccinated deaths since Public Health stopped updating Tableau on April 19, 2023, answering my first and third questions.
She did not take the opportunity to address my second question about Public Health’s failure to tell people the counter-narrative fact that only vaccinated county residents were dying of COVID-19 throughout the 12 months between May 2022 through April 2023, while always being quick to point out whenever someone unvaccinated or “not up to date” dies.
Berry included lengthy context on how she interprets these numbers, making several notable points that are off topic for this article but may be taken up in a future one (her full response can be read here).
Regarding closure of the data breach, Public Health Director Apple Martine reported that as of November 21, 10am:
Our JCPH technician worked with Tableau engineers yesterday afternoon, evening, and this morning to resolve the problem. There is no longer the possibility of accessing PHI from public.tableau.com now; these data have been removed. We expect to receive a formal accounting of how this happened from Tableau now that our incident ticket is being closed with their engineers. We will also be doing an internal after-action-review so that breach of PHI does not happen again. … The data should no longer be visible, and thank you for bringing it to our attention. We definitely want to make sure that we’re never exposing private health information, and breaches do happen.
Tableau charts that were leaking data have been replaced by a “404 Not Found” message.
City Financial Records Are Now Also Stored in the Cloud
Joining county Public Health in the cloud, the City of Port Townsend just shut down its local on-site server-based financial system Friday, July 19, 2024 and migrated to a Tableau-integrated cloud version on Monday, July 22.
The transition had “no hiccups… so far, so good,” according to Jodi Adams, new Director of Finance and Technology Services. Long-term plans are for Tableau to visualize data on the city website, but staff is currently learning to use it to make graphs for in-house reports.
City financial records are now stored in the cloud and managed via web browsers, including Accounts Payable & Receivable, Bank Reconciliation, Payroll, Human Resources, Employee Self Services, Utility Billing, and Project Management. Not yet included is the CivicPay option, enabling citizens to see and pay utility bills online.
Cloud migration was proposed by former Finance Director Connie Anderson and approved unanimously by city council at their February 21, 2023 meeting, but implementation took a year longer than projected.
The city had little choice — its vendor Springbrook had discontinued updates in favor of the company’s more expensive cloud version back in 2017, with support for the city’s on-site system fading and no better alternative offered by competing vendors, in line with the industry-wide push toward subscription-only cloud software replacing ownership with a rental model.
Anderson’s proposal identified a number of advantages of the cloud approach, including:
Eliminating cost of expensive on-site equipment;
Reducing the carbon footprint;
Tableau integration — visual analytics platform;
Enhanced data security protected by highest level of security available.
But any such “enhanced data security” is at best a trade-off, given that moving data to the cloud surrenders the natural physical security provided by restricting access to on-site users and those connected to the local area network. By contrast, cloud hosting exposes city finances to worldwide security risks either via web access, hackers, “careless computing”, or insider attacks at the cloud host.
A textbook example of these risks is Jefferson County Public Health’s data breach, from which the city can hopefully learn to take care not to likewise expose its own confidential financial records to the web via the Tableau cloud platform they both share.
Being an “old school” liberal, I had thought that the new ideology and its theories being taught in the schools — like Gender Identity — were just about respecting each other. Like most of our community, I tried to be inclusive by listening, learning, only asking a few questions using the new language, and keeping my opinions to myself.
I didn’t realize how much these new ideologies were affecting children and youth until 2017, when my daughter was in third grade.
She came home one day and asked if she was a boy.
Shocked and confused, I asked why she would think that. She told me that some of her peers thought she was a trans boy because she preferred to play with the boys and had a short haircut at the time. I found out that she wanted to play with the boys because the girls wanted to label themselves and others and talk about crushes. She just wanted to be a kid and play.
That became the first of many discussions explaining the difference between biological sex and stereotypes. Later, these conversations involved pressure she received from peers, and most recently adults, to self-label. She was even encouraged to become a trans boy to fit into her friend group better, which includes trans youth. By then, she knew herself better, but still wondered why they thought she was a boy.
From these discussions, I found out that many kids think that if you fit a gender stereotype then you are that gender, and that you can actually grow new genitals of that gender. Do kids who think this become teens who think they’re trans? I had more questions than answers.
This is when I started to pay full attention to what was going on in our community. I noticed children with no previous signs of gender dysphoria, but with a history of autism/neurodiversity, and/or trauma, become trans teens — some medically transitioning. They were all friends and some had multiple family members who were trans.
The adults they were close to seemed to ignore their comorbid issues and focused on supporting their trans identity instead. Why were they transitioning so fast? What would happen if they changed their minds? — a normal part of youth. None of this made any sense anymore.
I decided to do a deep dive into the origins of all of this and to see what has happened to other youth who transitioned years ago. I didn’t want to be part of something that may be hurting youth by remaining silent.
Detransitioners Raise Their Voices
Through researching all sides of this issue, I discovered the detransitioners: the growing number of former trans people who did change their minds, telling stories of regret and sometimes horror over their efforts to identify as the opposite sex. There are more than 53,000 detransitioners on Reddit alone, with more “coming out” every day.
“You lied and said transitioning would make my pain go away. You lied and said changing myself was the only treatment for my gender dysphoria. You lied and said the solution was changing my body when the problem was in my mind.
You treated my gender dysphoria as the root cause of my pain instead of a symptom of my underlying core issues. You treated me as a boy trapped in a girl’s body instead of a traumatized child dealing with the aftermath of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. You focused on the girl who wanted to be a boy and neglected to see the girl who was starving herself, self-harming, living in flashbacks, and actively suicidal.”
One detransioned woman describes how her undiagnosed autism was misinterpreted as Gender Dysphoria, the “clinical diagnosis received by transgender people.”
Elizabeth Hawker describes “unwittingly dressing up my Autism in the more fashionable clothing of Gender Dysphoria.”
“After six years of identifying as a trans man as a teenager, I desisted (stopped identifying as trans) at the age of 21. Since reclaiming my womanhood, I have been thinking long and hard about what exactly happened in my 15-year-old brain that made me feel I would only be stable and fulfilled if I took testosterone, changed my name and pronouns and socially became a man. The conclusion I have come to is that thinking I was trans was completely inseparable from my autism.”
“She implores parents to reject the advice of gender experts and politicians and trust their guts—their parental instincts—in the face of an onslaught of ideologically driven misinformation that steers them and their children toward risky decisions they may end up mourning for the rest of their lives.
Don’t be blindsided like so many parents I know,” warns Grossman, “be proactive and get educated. Feel prepared and confident to discuss trans, nonbinary, or whatever your child brings to the dinner table.” Whether it’s the “trans is as common as red hair” claim, or the “I’m not your son, I’m your daughter” proclamation, or the “do you prefer a live son or a dead daughter” threat, says Grossman, no family is immune, and every parent must be prepared.”
Why am I so concerned and determined to share this information? My research uncovered the link between all these theories and the policies in place for years now in our schools that encourage labeling and division. This is why I WILL NOT stay silent any longer.
Here are three key policies in Port Townsend schools and how they affect families:
This is part of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) training and related to Critical Race Theory (CRT) through the concept of Intersectionality. “Equity” does not mean equality — instead it involves holding back the oppressors and boosting the oppressed.
DEI divides persons into identity groups based on whether they are the oppressed (aka victim) or they are the oppressor. Individuals are not important. The identity groups are divided by race, gender, and sexuality. Economic class is ignored.
Here’s an example of what this looks like in action:
At the PT Schools Equity Forum we were divided into the following groups: people of the global majority (oppressed), white parents of students of the global majority (oppressed allies), and white people (oppressors). We were not allowed to talk to persons from other groups to solve problems.
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is supposed to create “a positive classroom climate” that “feels safe, respectful, welcoming, and supportive of student learning.” This “Equity-focused” practice assumes a child may have had a history of trauma and focuses on helping a child analyze their feelings. This can be in the form of frequent lessons exploring emotions and values or having students fill out questionnaires that ask questions like if they’re feeling depressed.
When The Benji Project visits a class to “teach proven mindfulness and self-compassion tools to young people,” along with meditation they also practice SEL — sometimes taking up more class time with SEL than academics. This is supposed to “create space for student voice and agency.”
However, when a student doesn’t find these practices helpful or doesn’t want to participate, they may be socially pressured by the adults to participate anyway. This is strange, since “student opinion … is considered a valuable part of the educational environment.”
An excellent resource on this subject is Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier. It talks about what I have seen in schools regarding SEL, how it impacts families, and how it, and related practices, increase anxiety and hurt kids’ mental health and development.
This policy involves the first step in Gender Affirming Care — social transition. Gender affirmation has been proven to be damaging to young children, unhelpful to teens, and it doesn’t prevent suicide. The latest report on Gender Affirming Care is the 2024 Cass Review, an independent evaluation of gender identity services for children and young people, led by Dr. Hilary Cass, a retired consultant paediatrician and the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in the UK.
This thorough analysis found that insufficient evidence was available to assess whether social transition in childhood has positive or negative effects on mental health, and that there was weak evidence for efficacy in adolescence. It questioned the reliability of international guidelines and advised caution in approaching social transition.
In Port Townsend, if a student of any age wishes to change their gender identity publicly, they can do this without their parent/guardians knowledge or permission and the school staff will socially affirm them.
A student can declare that they are the opposite of their biological sex and use the bathroom and locker room of their stated gender. Although “any student — regardless of gender identity — who requests greater privacy should be given access to an alternative restroom,” that is not always available when they need one. I’m not sure how this works in locker rooms.
Children thirteen years and older can see a gender affirming therapist for consultations without parents knowledge or permission. This can be done/started at the Port Townsend High School health clinic and soon will be available at Blue Heron (middle) School’s new health clinic for grades 6-8. Gender Affirming medical treatments (hormones, surgeries) need parental permission. However, kids who run away from home can receive Gender Affirming Care while in foster care if their parents refuse to affirm their new gender and cooperate with their transition (it can be considered emotional abuse per WA law ESSB 5599).
Gender Identity (a part of Gender theory which is a part of Queer theory) is a strong focus in SEL and Equity lessons. Students can be socially pressured by the adults to state their pronouns. Many young children believe that they can actually change their biological sex. I have learned that this is a frequent conversation amongst kids at Salish Coast Elementary. They are getting biological sex mixed up with gender stereotypes.
When kids are the age likely to believe in Santa and are taught starting in pre-kindergarten — through social media, kids TV shows, some adults, and their peers — that they can pick their gender, the confusion we are seeing makes sense. It took me one thoughtful conversation to tell my kids the truth about Santa, but it took many conversations to explain that they can’t change their bodies from boy to girl (and vice versa). The actual facts about this theory are clearly summarized in the article The Ideological Subversion of Biology.
This is especially hard to explain to neurodiverse children, like my own, who already struggle with identity and fitting in. Trans youth are mostly neurodiverse. This is why Seattle Children’s Autism Center has a partnership with their Gender Clinic.
Is encouraging gender transition “education” or indoctrination?
After I learned about the theories behind these policies and their wider impacts, I decided to look closer at how these ideas spread through our Port Townsend community. I discovered that 2017, the year my daughter and I had our first talk, was an impactful year for Gender Affirming Care in Port Townsend. Some of the youth I have mentioned, along with trans activist adults in our community, had put on a “legislative theater” performance called “Queer Youth Survival Quest.” A feature story in YES!Magazine explained that the interactive technique the production used was designed “to make concrete policy changes around a community justice issue.”
I noticed that community leaders, including those from Jefferson Healthcare and the Port Townsend School District, were in attendance.
It was that school year that the Gender-Inclusive Schools Policy was first created. There are now more than 20 books at Salish Coast Elementary, 35 books at Blue Heron School, and 30 books at Port Townsend High School that encourage gender transition.
Jefferson Healthcare started Gender Affirming Care training in 2017 as well (see Jefferson Healthcare’s Trans Mission). Since that year, more and more local youth have “come out” identifying as being part of the trans umbrella community — perhaps dozens. I’m finding out that many more youths that I had known as kids are choosing this identity. How many will medicalize due to this activism?
All of the theories that these policies are based on are part of Social Justice Activism. This movement was started by elite intellectuals who wanted to apply Postmodernist principles to society. They started actively teaching these practices in colleges starting in the 2010s. This is still taught today to all students in college.
This utopian theoretical ideology encourages the deconstruction of all parts of society including the way we communicate (that’s why language is always changing now). It emphasizes group identities, celebrates victimhood, and ignores the fact that people are individuals. This ideology especially despises science and reason. When this is taught to kids, it can lead to confusion regarding facts, loss of self-worth, and other mental health problems.
My journey to this discovery started more than six years ago. Now I’m a mom trying to share the truth about what kids are being taught in our community. So far, besides talking to friends, I’ve been to the Port Townsend Schools Equity Forum, the PTA, and have written a couple of letters to the Port Townsend Leader. I’m heading to the School Board next.
School Policy 2340 states that “materials and activities should be sensitive to America’s pluralistic society and should educate rather than indoctrinate.” Is the intensive pressure in our schools which encourages gender transitioning a form of education? Or are the policies described above — along with the flood of reading materials in school libraries plus the prominent display of the Trans Pride flag in every classroom celebrating this ideology — indoctrinating our kids?
I believe this is indoctrination. Schools should teach facts and how to think — NOT what to think. Families can handle the rest.
What Happened at Multicare? – A whistleblower reveals troubling new details about a Washington hospital’s push for “gender-affirming care” (Seattle Children’s, where local kids are referred, practices the same way).
On the afternoon of Wednesday, June 12th, attorneys for Port Townsend resident Julie Jaman filed a lawsuit on her behalf.The Center for American Liberty (CAL) registered the official complaint and demand for a jury trial in the Western District Court of Washington.
As we reported in March, legal action was threatened if the City and the YMCA did not meet demands for redress of Jaman’s grievances, including reinstating her pool privileges. The YMCA balked until early May, then declined to settle. The City never responded at all. From the law firm’s official press release:
“The City and YMCA’s failure to respond to Julie’s requests highlights their disregard for public safety,” said Harmeet Dhillon, CEO and Founder of The Center for American Liberty. “By prioritizing political ideology over the protection of children, they have set a dangerous precedent. As we pursue legal action, we demand accountability and a renewed commitment to protecting women’s privacy and civil rights.”
“After witnessing a disturbing incident in the women’s dressing room and raising concerns, I’ve faced a relentless storm of attacks and falsehoods,” Julie Jaman said. “Despite my four decades of community involvement, I’m left with no choice but to seek justice through the courts.”
The Center for American Liberty summarizes the lawsuit thusly:
BANNED FOR LIFE.
When Julie Jaman saw a man in a women’s swimsuit assisting young girls undress in a pool locker room, she was startled and shocked. She believed she may be witnessing a crime in progress.
The Port Townsend City Pool — operated by the local YMCA — has a policy that allows men who identify as women to use women’s private spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. But the YMCA didn’t publicize the policy or warn the women using these facilities that they could be sharing the space with a man at any moment.
In the locker room, Julie was understandably concerned by the situation playing out in front of her. She confronted the man and asked him to leave. Within moments of this conversation, YMCA staff began berating Julie for her comments.
Instead of addressing Julie’s concerns, the YMCA immediately subjected Julie to a series of escalating punishments:
• YMCA staff told Julie that her objection to having a man in the woman’s locker room was “discriminatory.”
• Because Julie’s comment was “discriminatory,” the YMCA banned her for life from all facilities run by that YMCA branch.
• When Julie objected and attempted to explain her side of the story, YMCA staff called the police on her.
What began as an attempt to protect two young girls from exposing themselves in front of an adult male ended with a call to the police—to investigate Julie, not the man in the locker room.
Sadly, this type of injustice has become a common occurrence in today’s society. It’s a direct result of prioritizing adherence to radical gender ideology over protecting our fundamental rights.
Object to a man in the women’s locker room? Banned. Draw attention to the dangers of the bathroom policy? Silenced.
That’s why Julie is fighting back.
The Center for American Liberty filed a lawsuit against the YMCA and the City of Port Townsend on Julie’s behalf, asking the court to force the City to lift Julie’s lifetime ban. The City of Port Townsend and the YMCA punished Julie because of the content of her speech—because she spoke out after seeing a man in the women’s locker room. Julie deserves justice for the violation of her First Amendment rights and the emotional distress she’s experienced because of this ordeal.
And in her own words…
The written record shows that City Manager John Mauro was not the least bit interested in hearing Jaman’s version of the episode. (See lawsuit Exhibits 8-29 here.) The rush to judgment was immediate and uncompromising, following the arc of ideological narratives one now expects to hear from city hall. Ends justifying the means, City Manager Mauro and advisors swiftly determined that the City was obligated to follow Washington State law alone, forsaking concerns — if they were considered at all — for pragmatic child protection and the U.S. Constitution. It is there — on the constitutional grounds — that this battle will be waged.
The introduction of the lawsuit follows:
1. The City of Port Townsend, Washington (the “City” or “Port Townsend”) has an indoor community swimming facility called the Mountain View Pool (the “Pool”). As with most community pools, residents of this small city use the Pool to recreate and connect with others. But at this pool, patrons must forfeit their First Amendment rights before being allowed in. This is unconstitutional.
2. The City outsources day-to-day management of the Pool to the Olympic Peninsula YMCA (the “YMCA”), a local affiliate of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Although the YMCA is a private non-profit corporation, its operation of the Pool is state action subject to constitutional restrictions. Not only is the Pool government property, but the City remains intimately involved in its management, maintenance, and repair, partnering with the YMCA in that endeavor. In the YMCA’s operation of the Pool and the public messaging associated with the events at issue here, the YMCA and the City have failed to uphold their constitutional obligations as government actors.
3. Plaintiff Julie Jaman is an eighty-two-year-old resident of Port Townsend, where she has lived for forty-eight years. For much of her life, she has served as an advocate for women survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse. Until recently, she regularly used the Pool for recreational and therapeutic purposes.
4. That changed on July 26, 2022, when the YMCA summarily and permanently banned Jaman from the Pool. That day, Jaman was showering in the women’s locker room after swimming. While in the shower, she heard a male voice coming from inside the locker room. She opened the shower curtain and saw a male in a female swimsuit—an individual who was later identified to her as “Clementine Adams”—with two young girls as they were preparing to use the toilet. Adams was helping one of the young girls remove her bathing suit.
5. Jaman thought she was witnessing a crime in progress, so she spoke up as best she could under the circumstances: she told Adams to leave the women’s locker room. A YMCA staff person immediately entered the locker room, and Jaman asked the staff member to remove Adams. Instead, the staff person berated Jaman for her “discriminatory” statements toward Adams and told Jaman on the spot that she was “banned for life” from the Pool for objecting to Adams’s presence in the locker room.
6. As Jaman later learned, Adams was a YMCA camp counselor and identified as female. Unbeknownst to Jaman, (1) the YMCA’s policy was to allow patrons to use the locker room consistent with their gender identity irrespective of their sex, (2) Adams had the YMCA’s permission to be in the women’s locker room, and (3) Adams had the YMCA’s permission to assist the young girls in using the toilet.
7. Since the incident, Port Townsend officials and YMCA employees have conspired together to engage in a high-profile public relations campaign designed to justify Jaman’s lifetime ban, to smear her, and to make her appear to be bigoted and a serial harasser of transgender individuals. None of this is true. Jaman supports keeping women’s private spaces reserved for women, but she does not harbor hate towards anyone based on their gender identity, nor has she ever harassed anyone at the Pool or elsewhere. Yet that is exactly what Port Townsend and the YMCA have led the public to believe through their false and misleading statements. Like the YMCA’s operation of the Pool, this smear campaign was unconstitutional state action.
8. To this day, almost two years after the incident, Port Townsend and the YMCA have maintained the lifetime ban against Jaman from using the Pool.
9. Defendants’ actions against Jaman were both unlawful and shameful. When an eighty-year-old woman reasonably believes she is witnessing a crime being committed against young girls in a women’s locker room, the government’s reaction should be to gather all of the facts and learn what happened, not immediately take sides in an ideologically charged political debate. Defendants may not summarily punish Jaman for her speech in reaction to what she saw, nor may they defame her for speaking out.
10. Jaman simply wants to return to the Pool she has used for almost forty years and to be compensated for the deprivation of her rights. The Pool is particularly important to her now that, due to her arthritis, swimming is the best form of exercise available to her. In addition, she wants to continue recreating with her friends and fellow Pool patrons. She wants everyone at the Pool to feel safe and secure in sensitive places. And above all else, she wants her life back.
11. Defendants’ lifetime ban against Jaman, their smear campaign against her, and their refusal to allow her to return to the Pool represents the sad reality of constitutional rights and public safety in Port Townsend. Jaman brings this action to remedy this harm.
City Officials’ Presumption of Guilt
Jaman’s version of the initial exchange between her and Adams has been consistent from day one. She said no more than ten words to the young man in a woman’s swimsuit in the ladies’ locker room. Evidently, Rowen DeLuna — the staff person who berated Jaman for her “discriminatory” statements toward Adams, told Jaman on the spot that she was “banned for life” from the pool, and is named as a defendant in the lawsuit — and/or someone else from the Y felt the need to embellish. Jaman was accused of saying things that anyone who knows her would instantly see as inconsistent with her integrity and nature.
Reporting to his “Leadership Team” the day after the August 1st city council meeting where Jaman shared her experience, and many supporters expressed their concern with how the situation had been handled thus far, Mauro sent out a “note to staff” to set the stage — here’s the official story, we should have no deviations from it, beware of misinformation coming from ’the other side.’
City Manager John Mauro’s communication to staff dated August 2nd, 2022. From CAL lawsuit Exhibits 8-29; page 33.
So that’s that. No questions asked — of Jaman, that is. Here is what the Y said you said. Did you, in fact, say these things? No, that question was never posed to the accused. As kangaroo court a hearing of an event as could possibly be held.
It’s all too familiar in government today, when charges of misinformation are commonly cast by the true misinformers.
The staff member, Adams, did not “endure a barrage of unfair, disrespectful and offensive attacks.”
Jaman had no idea she might encounter a male in the locker room, nor that she was expected to use ‘family changing rooms’ if she wished to avoid exposing herself to such males — because the Y did not make this clear to patrons. Not through signage, announcements in the city newsletter, nor discussion with incoming pool users. Purposely? Perhaps, to avoid the controversy. Or maybe they hadn’t gone all in on the changes themselves?
Mauro continues the sermon with a third point, that being Port Townsend’s designation as a sanctuary city, “welcoming of all residents and our diversity.” He proceeds to launch sideways accusations at Jaman, suggesting she was “intolerant, unkind… fueled by fear, anger and hate.” Again, anyone who knows Julie Jaman knows these inflammatory charges are patently absurd.
Throwing Good Money After Bad
Mauro and his advisors spent $3,000 of our city’s precious treasure to hire a PR firm to help manage the debacle. They produced a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) bulletin that was posted on the city’s website. It, too, contained falsehoods, including repetition of the claim that Jaman had “made discriminatory and derogatory comments toward” Adams.
Their FAQ also stated that Jaman had engaged in a “documented previous pattern of disrespectful behavior” at the Pool, a defamatory allegation that was news to Jaman. No such “pattern” had ever been discussed with her by Y staff. No documentation was forthcoming when requested. It does not exist. At least it did not exist before ’the incident.’
Have these actors — obviously so willing to make false claims and character assassinations — been foolish enough to do a little creative backstory-building to cover their rear ends in what has turned out to be quite a serious matter? Let us hope not.
Councillor Libby Wennstrom and Mayor David Faber get (dis)honorable mention in the suit, both for their social media posts suggesting that Jaman was “bigoted and intolerant of transgender-identifying individuals,” with Wennstrom going further by insinuating that Jaman’s presence at the Y had potential to undermine the safety of trans-identifying people.
For greater details, read the lawsuit and the appended exhibits (1, 2). Defendants have 21 days to respond once the Court executes the summonses and the defendants are served with same. We will report updates in the comment section as we hear of them.
The defendants in this case — and their partisans, too — would do well to pay heed to one of our more timeless proverbs, which has never had more relevance: Pride comes before a fall.
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Feature image used with permission, Praetorian Public Relations, Walnut Creek, CA
The Leader‘s April 12 front-page headline “Blue Heron Middle School awarded grant for mental health” caught my attention, reminding me of a recent conversation with a high school teacher revealing that close to half of his students are in counseling for mental health issues.
This seems a staggering number, and reflects what is widely known: Our children are in the midst of a mental health crisis. Anything that might help our youth deal with anxiety and depression, easily accessed during their day at school, promises to be a good and positive change.
So that’s where School-Based Health Centers (SBHC) come in, with Blue Heron Middle School slated to become our county’s latest clinic in the fall of 2024. This article explores the SBHC concept, the entities and funding behind it, and what it all means for parents of students in Jefferson County schools.
More than likely, as a parent, in that pile of papers you signed at the beginning of the school year — and certainly, if your child received a sports physical from the school-based clinic at Port Townsend, Chimacum, or Quilcene — you, like me, signed a release giving permission to Jefferson School Based Health Centers to “perform such medical and therapeutic procedures as may be professionally necessary or advisable for me (or my child’s) health screening, diagnosis, and treatment.”
The form looks like this:
Top portion of page 1 of the two-page form giving parental General Consent for Services. The full form can be viewed here.
There is more to granting this permission than may meet the eye. In 2019, through highly controversial legislation, Washington State provided for out-patient mental health treatment for minors without parental consent. Parents’ rights were removed to even be informed about certain treatments and services that school personnel and outside professionals deemed advisable.
After citizens statewide successfully challenged that legislation earlier this year with the Parents Bill of Rights (more on that below), state policy appears to be in the process of shifting. But revised guidelines have yet to be developed. And local SBHC officials maintain that the parental rights initiative applies only to records kept by public schools, school staff, and school administrations. They contend SBHCs are separate entities from the schools and will not be required to share their records with parents even with the new law.
Parents need to be aware of what current guidelines allow for, who/what is behind the SBHC enterprise, and what is at stake. Even after researching this, the question of what parents are consenting to when they grant blanket permission to Jefferson School Based Health Centers remains shrouded in unknowns.
In 1987, the Seattle City Council funded a three-year pilot of a SBHC at Rainier Beach High School, and services started in 1988. This successful pilot paved the way for Seattle levy funding for SBHCs in 1990 and King County levy funding in 2016. State and federal funding became available for SBHCs statewide in 2021.
There has been rapid growth of SBHC’s across the state in recent years, with diverse operational and funding models, with the number almost doubling since 2017. Today, there are more than 70 SBHC sites, sponsored by more than 25 healthcare agencies, in over 30 school districts – urban, suburban, and rural – across Washington.
According to Gerald Braud, writing for Informed Choice Washington, recent legislation in our state ensures this concept will continue to grow. HB 1225 created a school-based health center program office in the Washington State Department of Health in 2022, staffed with three and half employees at a cost of nearly $2 million a year.
It is not a new concept in Jefferson County, which currently has three SBHCs overseen by Jefferson County Public Health, located at Port Townsend High School, Chimacum High School, and Quilcene K-12. The clinic at Blue Heron, scheduled to open fall of 2024, will be the fourth.
According to the Leader, the grant covering the cost of remodeling the space for the clinic at Blue Heron is from the Washington State Legislature, but the concept and support for the Washington School-Based Health Alliance comes from the increasingly influential, parent non-profit, School-Based Health Alliance, founded in 1995, and based in Washington D.C.
“School-based health care is a powerful tool for achieving health equity among children and adolescents who unjustly experience disparities in outcomes simply because of their race, ethnicity, family income, or where they live. It’s an idea that has gained currency across the country: place critically needed services like medical, behavioral, dental, and vision care directly in schools so that all young people, no matter their ZIP code, have an equal opportunity to learn and grow. At the School-Based Health Alliance, we’ve worked for over 25 years to:
Advance national policy and legislative priorities for the field
Advocate for greater support and funding
Promote high-quality clinical practices and standards
Support data collection and reporting, evaluation, and research
Provide training, technical assistance, and consultation”
Funding Sources and National Partners
Here are the current entities listed as funding this national enterprise:
Pivotal Ventures;
MacKenzie Scott;
Connecticut State Department of Public Health;
Health Resources and Services Administration;
NBA Foundation;
No Kid Hungry by Share Our Strength;
The Leon Lowenstein Foundation;
JBS International – a Celerian Group Company;
Rand Corporation;
National Council for Well Being;
Merck & Co.
I picked a few of these organizations that I thought might stand out for Jefferson County readers so we can understand who is funding the SBHA on a national level.
Pivotal Ventures manages the philanthropic efforts of Melinda French Gates, former wife of Microsoft’s Bill Gates.
MacKenzie Scott is the former wife of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Together, in January 2024, these two donated $23 million to the School-Based Health Alliance to help launch school based health clinics in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston and Miami as well as fund general operations.
Rand Corporation (yes, that Rand!) is usually associated with the military and self-described as “a non-profit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis.”
Merck makes, markets, and sells drugs and is self described as “aspiring to be the premier research intensive biopharmaceutical company.”
This enterprise also incorporates corporate interests and advocacy groups in its dozens of SBHA National Partners. Along with health associations and organizations like American Academy of Family Physicians and Boston Children’s Hospital, current partners include Colgate-Palmolive, National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center, Beyond the Pill, Unity Consortium/United for Adolescent Vaccination, and Conrad Hilton Corporation (full list at bottom*).
As mentioned previously, the Washington School-Based Health Alliance is the state level outreach division of the national SBHA. Here is the current list of entities described as grant funders, event sponsors, and individual donors for the Washington School-Based Health Alliance:
Kaiser Permanente;
Ballmer Group;
Washington Association for Community Health;
ARCORA the Foundation of Delta Dental of Washington;
Washington State Department of Health;
Washington State Health Care Authority;
Community Health Plan of Washington;
Molina Health Care;
Swedish Hospital.
Kaiser Permanente is a health insurance provider in Washington State and, in its own words, “exists to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve.” The latest information I could find stated that in 2019 Kaiser Permanente entered a three year, $1.2 million agreement to provide start-up funds for two school-based health clinics in Washington State.
The Ballmer Group manages former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife’s philanthropic efforts. They donated $450,000 to general operations for the Washington SBHA from 2022 to 2025.
“The ACA, through section 4101(a), funded the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) School-Based Health Center Capital Program, which provides $50 million a year for four years (2010 through 2013) for one-time funding for construction, renovation, and equipment for SBHCs.”
The pipeline remains open to this day. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), and the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), announced $206 million in grant awards towards youth mental health.
Why This Matters – Losing Parental Consent
Why have I just overloaded you with information? Why should any parent, or anybody in Jefferson County, care about any of this?
“I give permission to Jefferson School Based Health Center to perform such medical and therapeutic procedures as may be professionally necessary or advisable for me (or my child’s) health screening, diagnosis, and treatment.”
What parent could imagine, with those few words regarding medical care at school, that they could be opening a door that allows access to their adolescent children for the massive conglomeration of federal, state, and private entities that populate the above lists? Or that the procedures they are allowing could potentially be provided without their consent?
What have we done by signing this release?
I wish we were talking about what many of us experienced in public school when life was a bit less complicated. You didn’t feel well, you went to the school nurse who looked you over, maybe gave you a band-aid. If you were running a fever, your parents were called to come pick you up.
But it’s not that way anymore.
Please look over the following chart from the website of the Washington School-Based Health Alliance, titled “Providing Health Care to Minors under Washington Law: A summary of health care services that can be provided to minors without parental consent.” School-Based Health Centers are an entry point providing access to these treatments through mental health care or referral to care providers off campus. Critics may note that this graphic is dated July 10, 2015, but I include it because it is posted on the Washington School-Based Health Alliance website, provides the best summary I could find, and continues to reflect the current state of the law.
One change not reflected in this chart regards recent house bills passed in Washington State that some suggest might open the door to gender reassignment surgery for adolescents (13 years and older) without parental consent via out-patient mental health treatment:
SB5904 allows “adolescents to confidentially and independently seek services for mental health and substance use disorders.”
SSB5889 requires insurance providers to communicate only with the person receiving the care regardless of who holds the policy.
And SB5313 bans insurance companies from rejecting gender affirming surgical procedures previously considered cosmetic, if they are deemed medically necessary.
The Pendulum Swings Back – Parents Bill of Rights
On March 4, 2024, the Washington State Legislature passed Initiative 2081 to establish a Parents Bill of Rights, by a wide bi-partisan margin. As a successful citizens initiative, signed by over 450,000 voters, it did not need the governor’s approval and became law ninety days later on June 4.
The opening paragraph of Initiative 2081 reads as follows:
“The legislature finds that: (a) Parents are the primary stakeholders in their children’s upbringing; (b) parental involvement is a significant factor in increasing student achievement; (c) access to student information encourages greater parental involvement.”
The initiative then lists the rights of parents and legal guardians of public school children younger than eighteen years old. Most of the rights mentioned already exist in state law. The key rights defined in this initiative, relative to medical care without parental consent, secures the parental right to inspect their child’s school records in accordance with RCW 28A.605.030.
It goes on to enumerate that public school records include all of the following: public school records, medical or health records, records of any mental health counseling, records of vocational counseling, records of discipline, records of attendance, also notifications of when medical services are being offered to their child, notification of any medical service or medications having been provided that result in any financial impact to the parent’s or legal guardian’s insurance payments or co-pays, notification when the school has arranged directly or indirectly for medical treatment that results in follow up care beyond normal school hours, and immediate notification if their child is taken or removed from their public school campus without parental permission.
Previously the schools followed administrative rules provided by the Washington State School Directors Association, WSSDA. In particular Policy 3211 — Gender Inclusive Schools, and Policy 3211 — Procedures – Gender Inclusive Schools. The key sentence in these procedures is: “Before contacting a student’s parents, the school will consult with the student about the student’s preferences regarding family involvement and consider whether safety concerns are present for the student.”
Parents might also want to know that these procedures seem to suggest setting up two sets of books — “Official Records” under the students legal name, the only one of which is the standardized high school transcript; and “Unofficial Records,” explained in the procedures, kept under the name chosen by the student to represent “how they choose to be addressed in their transgender or gender expansive status.”
The following paragraph from the procedures details the current policy In regards to what schools will release to parents (emphasis mine):
Information about a student’s gender identity, legal name, or assigned sex at birth may constitute confidential medical or educational information. Disclosing this information to other students, their parents, or other third parties may violate privacy laws, such as the federal Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 U.S.C. §1232; 34 C.F.R. Part 99). Parents have the right under FERPA to request their student’s records and if requested, the District will provide the student’s educational records to the parent according to 3231/3231P.
State and Local Responses to Requests for Clarification
In the second week of May, I contacted Annie Hetzal, the School Health Services Consultant, at the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), and asked if Washington State Superintendent Chris Reykdal had made any statements or issued instructions to school superintendents in regards to the parental rights initiative so that parents can access all their children’s school records, including from school-based health clinics, as soon as the initiative became law in June.
She told me in a text that the state Superintendent’s latest statement to district superintendents was “that OSPI is working on guidance for schools that is not yet finished.”
To clarify some of these issues on a local level, I contacted Jefferson County Public Health and spoke with Susan O’Brien, a family nurse practitioner in the Jefferson SBHCs.
Susan started with a brief history. Jefferson SBHCs got their start in 2007 with a grant from the Washington State Department of Health. Clinics were opened at Port Townsend High School and Chimacum High School for the 2008/2009 school year. The clinics were finished with donations of labor and materials from citizens and businesses in Jefferson County. This was the community coming together to fill a need that they believed wasn’t being met elsewhere.
The school clinics are primarily run by Jefferson County Public Health in cooperation with Jefferson Healthcare, and the Jefferson County School Districts. The hospital regularly provides funds for the clinics, and has a designated liaison, Dr. Sara Schmidt, who works as the main contact for requests coming from the clinics.
The recent funds from the state legislature are paying only for the remodel of the space at Blue Heron Middle School that will be used as a clinic. This was the first time that funding came from outside the community.
Students are allowed to come in with their friends, often just to ask questions like “What is going on with my body?”
Susan gave me an example of how these clinics can help families new to the community. A parent who just moved here had a child with asthma who needed help. Setting up a primary care provider can take months. The SBHC at the child’s school was able to utilize their close relationship with Jefferson Healthcare to shortcut the process and get the needed treatment for the child.
The Jefferson SBHCs track student use in two categories, medical visits and mental health visits. The information below also details how many “visits” translate into “users” or actual treatment:
Chimacum: 200 medical visits from 89 users, 203 mental health visits from 89 users;
Port Townsend: 325 medical visits from 157 users, 457 mental health visits from 42 users;
Quilcene: 79 medical visits from 40 users, 392 mental health visits from 35 users.
Breakdown of mental health visits and users in the report. Note that Brinnon which is K-8 does not have an SBHC, however their high school students attend Quilcene HS, which does.
Typical requests are sports physicals, birth control, concussion management, immunizations.
If needed, the SBHCs try to work directly with the student’s primary care physician. Other partners in the community include Discovery Behavioral Health and Jefferson Healthcare. Referrals for physical therapy to Jefferson Healthcare or Discovery Physical Therapy in Port Hadlock are not uncommon.
Obtaining Healthcare Without Parental Consent
When I ask about what I have found to be of greatest concern among parents — the ability of adolescents to obtain medical and mental healthcare without parental consent — Susan is clear in stating: “We follow the laws of Washington state. At the same time, we encourage the students to talk to their parents. Some students don’t feel safe. That’s why we have these laws in Washington state.”
If there is a problem with care received at a Jefferson SBHC, the practitioners, who are licensed employees of Jefferson Public Health, would be the responsible party. There is no direct state oversight. However, the Jefferson County Board of Health and Health Officer for Jefferson County, Dr. Allison Berry, provides oversight of the clinics at the county level.
Susan O’Brien stated, “The most important thing for parents to know is that school-based clinics are like clinics anywhere in Washington state — adolescents can receive mental health care without their parent’s consent.” She went on to explain that what the practitioners in the Jefferson SBHCs want is to support kids to be healthy in every way possible. Parents, she said, can choose for their children to not use the SBHCs if they so wish.
The Jefferson County Public Health website is not clear regarding that assertion. While their page about SBHCs notes that “students must be registered with signed parental consent to be seen for medical concerns,” it also displays a prominent notice assuring teens that they can access many services without their parents’ knowledge.
Notice featured on Jefferson County Public Health’s website describing SBHC’s “Confidential & affordable healthcare for students.”
As to the parental rights initiative, Susan confirmed that the Jefferson SBHCs have yet to receive any guidance from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction and “will be following the laws of Washington state.” As noted earlier, Jefferson County Public Health’s current position is that the Parents Bill of Rights will not affect their policies, that it applies only to records kept by public schools, school staff, and school administrations. Susan says the SBHCs are separate entities from the schools and will not be required to share their records with parents. She summarized it this way:
“We don’t share our records with the schools, and the schools don’t share their records with us.“
It remains to be seen how or if the parental rights initiative will be implemented as the law now goes into effect (assuming it survives an off-mission American Civil Liberties Union legal challenge).
Ultimately, if parents are unhappy with the current state of affairs, it will be up to these parents to become familiar with current state law to establish their rights, while working cooperatively with their school administrators, school boards, and School-Based Health Centers to get the information they need to care for their children.
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*Full list of SBHA National Partners: AASA/The School Superintendents Association; American Academy of Family Physicians; Adolescent Health Initiative; Alliance for a Healthier Generation; American School Counselor Association; Apex; Association of Asian Pacific Community Health Organizations; ASTDD; Bi-State Primary Care Association; Beyond the Pill; The Center for Health and Healthcare in Schools, Child Trends, Coalitions for Community Schools; Institution for Educational Leadership; Community Health Center, Inc.; Conrad Hilton Corporation; Farmworker Justice; National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center; Futures Without Violence; Health Outreach Partners; Johns Hopkins Consortium for School Based Health Solutions; Kaiser Permanente Thriving Schools; Mental Health Technology Transfer Center Network; Mid-Atlantic Tele-Health Resource Center; South Carolina Telehealth Alliance; Medical University of South Carolina; National Association of Community Health Centers; National Center for School Mental Health; National Health Care for the Homeless Council; Public Health Management Corporation’s National Nurse-Led Care Consortium; Trust for America’s Health; University of California/San Francisco; Unity Consortium/United for Adolescent Vaccination; American Academy of Pediatrics; Kaiser Permanente; National Association of Community Health Workers; Center for Adoption Support and Education; Prevent Blindness; Moses/Weitzman Health System; National Association of School Nurses; National Center for Safe Supportive Schools; Colgate-Palmolive; National Association of School Psychologists; Health Leads; Boston Children’s Hospital.
Welcome to The Jefferson County Beacon, which describes itself as “a worker-directed nonprofit news outlet managed by a board of your friends and neighbors.”
But who has actually financed this new “local” initiative? A little digging reveals that it is part of a national news network being built and funded by billionaire globalists.
Clicking the “Support Local News” link beneath the Beacon directs to where folks can donate “$5,000+” or other amounts to this 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose Donor Transparency Policy pledges to “make public all revenue sources and donors who give $5,000 or more per year.”
Clicking the Beacon‘s “About” menu “Fiscal Sponsor” link points to the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), whose mission is “to build a nonprofit news network that ensures all people in every community have access to trusted news.”
INN’s mission is part of the Trusted News Initiative, described by Influence Watch as “a coalition of left-of-center media, social media, and technology companies created by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in 2019 with the ‘specific aims of flagging disinformation during elections,’ and to also censor what the initiative deems is misinformation… Organizations that are partners of the initiative include the Associated Press, BBC, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Google, Twitter, and The Washington Post.”
This alliance’s collusion currently faces antitrust challenges because while it “publicly purports to be a self-appointed ‘truth police’ extirpating online ‘misinformation,’ in fact it has suppressed wholly accurate and legitimate reporting in furtherance of the economic self-interest of its members.”
Clicking its “Network” link brings up the INN Network Directory where you are encouraged to Find Your News. It lists “more than 425 independent news organizations in a new kind of news network” that the Beacon has now joined, which “the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) strengthens and supports.”
Examples of other INN Network community news sites using similar design templates, donation links, and policy language.
Browsing through several of these INN Network Directory news sites, they all appear to be cookie-cutter websites based on similar design templates, similar donation links, and similar boilerplate policy language as The Jefferson County Beacon, despite each purporting to be “local”, “independent”, and “community-supported.”
Follow The Money
Who actually bankrolls the INN and its network of news sites like the Beacon? According to its Supporters & Financials page, the Democracy Fund and Google News Initiative and several left-leaning foundations contribute more than $500,000 each, along with lesser donations from Microsoft and many others.
What is the Democracy Fund? According to its Financials page, it was “established and solely funded by philanthropist and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar” then spun off to the billionaire’s Omidyar Network, which describes itself as “a social change venture that reimagines critical systems, and the ideas that govern them, to build more inclusive and equitable societies … across the globe.”
“Unbiased” Reporting?
The Beaconsays it wants to hire local reporters with “a passion for independent news” to “tell the Local story with an unbiased approach.”
This “unbiased” start-up seeks local hires funded by international moneyed interests with a plan to change society in ways that arguably eliminate freedoms and diversity and tighten top-down controls. It comes at a time when a majority of networked media outlets purporting to be local and independent actually adhere to the same copycat globalist-directed scripts.
Remember the viral video exposing nearly 200 “local” CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox affiliate anchors reciting an identical message about fake news?
Click to watch 1 minute-36 second viral video, exposing the script from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which controls news stations nationwide.
Each of the affiliates first explained that their greatest responsibility was to serve their (fill-in-the-blank) communities, and then went on in scripted unison to decry other news sources as biased and irresponsible. The eerie compilation of voices, all stressing the same words, warned “This is extremelydangerous to our democracy.”
The expanding INN news initiative, already comprising more than 425 “independent” publications that the Beacon is now allied with, also coincides with a parallel effort by Soros Fund Management to embark on a “large audio-buying spree,” adding to the hundreds of US radio stations the George Soros group currently owns.
Consolidation of messaging to support a global agenda continues apace.
Given its origin as “a social change venture” funded by tech-giant billionaires, the Beacon should be mindful and honest about its own dependencies and biases… especially compared to the Port Townsend Leader, which (whatever its shortcomings) remains one of the last local independent papers in the country.
The Beaconsays it “was born when it became clear that Jefferson County needed a community-focused newspaper,” pretending the Leader does not focus on the county community. But what “community” does the Beacon feel the need to focus on?
Our politically-diverse county at large?
Or some like-minded coterie seeking an echo chamber free from viewpoints it blames the Leader — which for years has heavily censored local voices like those represented in the Port Townsend Free Press (see articles here, here, and here) — for not censoring enough?
May these qualms prove unfounded and the Beacon live up to its name, shining the light of truth as a vibrant part of our local media ecosystem.
Management blamed the PDA’s crash on Covid, but conditions were already precarious. The embezzlement and diversion of funds took time to clean up after, but there does not seem to have been a plan for how to repay the restructured debt. It is anybody’s guess why the PDA spun hospitality operations out into a separate entity when those operations didn’t make money in the first place.
When kids are the age likely to believe in Santa and are taught starting in pre-kindergarten — through social media, kids TV shows, some adults, and their peers — that they can pick their gender, the confusion we are seeing makes sense. It took me one thoughtful conversation to tell my kids the truth about Santa, but it took many conversations to explain that they can’t change their bodies from boy to girl (and vice versa). The actual facts about this theory are clearly summarized in the article 
