Maine mom demands investigation after school allegedly coaches daughter on secret gender transition

A Maine mother is demanding that an investigation be opened into her daughter’s former school after administrators allegedly hid the girl’s attempted gender transition from her family.

Amber Lavigne’s claims a social worker at Great Salt Bay Community School in Damariscotta gave her 13-year-old-daughter a transitioning device called a “chest binder.”

“Public school districts should never hide things from parents, especially not information about their child’s mental health or physical well-being,” Adam Shelton, an attorney for Lavigne, told Fox News Digital.

“But that’s exactly what the Great Salt Bay Community School did to Amber Lavigne, secretly advising Amber’s 13-year-old daughter to change her gender and encouraging the child not to tell her parents.”

Lavigne found the chest-flattening binder in her daughter’s possession in December, and the child initially told her mother she got it from a friend before she changed her story.

“I want you to think long and hard if there’s anything else you want to share with me about this because I am going to reach out to your friend’s mom,” Lavigne said she told her daughter in an interview with National Review.

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Over the fall, the daughter had been assigned a new social worker, Samuel Roy, at the public school, but Lavigne said she was never alerted to the change and was never contacted by Roy. She also found that school employees allegedly referred to her daughter by a new name and used male pronouns.

Lavigne said she immediately contacted Superintendent Lynsey Johnston and Principal Kim Schaff about the chest binder and had a phone call with Schaff.

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“I poured my heart out to this woman. She absolutely validated my feelings and made me feel like something was going to be done,” Lavigne told National Review.

But after Schaff and Johnston allegedly met with the social worker, Lavigne said school leaders appeared to side with Roy and refused to hand over documents on her daughter, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

“These people had no desire to work with me as a human being,” she said, citing how she got no answers from school leaders while attending a board meeting in December.

She soon pulled her daughter from the school and is now homeschooling her, according to National Review.

“I think that it says that we as parents no longer are in charge of our kids. It’s scary, really,” Lavigne told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham last week.

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The mother, who also has a year-old son and 4-year-old son, is putting pressure on the school to open an investigation into the social worker.

The Goldwater Institute sent a letter to the chairman of the Great Salt Bay school board this month to call for an investigation and demand that policies be updated so that parents are alerted when their child’s mental and physical health are affected by decisions made at school.

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“Parents have a constitutional right to control and direct the education, upbringing and health care decisions of their children,” her attorney told Fox News Digital. “But parents cannot effectively do that if schools are actively concealing information from them. That’s why we’re stepping in to hold the school accountable for violating Amber’s constitutionally protected parental rights.”

Lavigne is a self-described Democrat and “pretty open-minded person” who runs a mental health organization that has previously worked with transgender individuals.

Though her daughter is still struggling with her gender identity, Lavigne said that the teen loved feminine things like wearing makeup and painting her nails when she was younger.

“That’s one of the most bizarre things about this,” Lavigne told National Review. “I wanted so badly for my daughter to be an athlete, because I was an athlete; I was a wicked tomboy growing up. I’m like, ‘She’s going to be a basketball superstar.’ I couldn’t get this kid to pick up a frigging baseball and throw it at me to save her life. She was into tutus and My Little Ponies.”

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Lavigne added in a comment to Fox News’ “Ingraham Angle” that the school is trying to “bully” her “into silence.”

“It’s like the most toxic relationship you’ve ever been in there,” she said. “They’re gaslighting me.”

The school board sent a letter to the community last month claiming that attention on the alleged covert attempted gender transition of the teen “directly” led to the school receiving bomb threats.

“Certain parties are spreading a grossly inaccurate and one-sided story to which the board cannot specifically respond, given our obligation to maintain the confidentiality of student and employee information, as required by Maine law,” the board said in its letter on Jan. 14, according to the Lincoln County News. “Unfortunately, that false narrative has directly given rise to the bomb threats that have disrupted our students’ education over the past several weeks.”

 

School officials did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. A review of the school’s staff page found Roy is still employed at the school.

Fox News Digital’s Peter Aitken contributed to this report.