With the 2025–2026 academic year opening, I recently overheard two fathers talking about their children’s pre-K school. The matter at hand was before-care and after-care.
“We got a MailChimp survey asking the parents if they need before-care starting at 7:30 and after-care until 6:00.”
“What was the result?”
“Only a few parents out of the fifty or so were interested, so the school isn’t offering it.”
That’s the extent of “administrative burden” in the pre-K world. A short survey, responses from parents, and a quick decision. No demonstrations, no transphobe insults, no litigation. The small number of parents who need those additional services will need to hire babysitters or look for a different school. In the world of free and voluntary exchange, there is very little administrative burden.
Compare that with the administrative burden the Board of Education and Montgomery County Public Schools inflict on us regarding the opt-out of LGBT studies. Following the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate opt-out from the progressives’ coercion, Superintendent Thomas Taylor announced the new policy:
Every nine weeks, parents will receive a one-page outline of upcoming topics and reading materials for their child’s classes. The document will go out both digitally and on paper—accessible enough, Taylor says, “to put on your refrigerator.”
Teachers need to take time to prepare these outlines, parents need to remember to read them (how many parents out there read emails from the schools?), prepare their children to opt out of the lessons, and then disrupt the classroom as those children leave. That is indeed administrative burden.
The problem is that this burden is all manufactured by the county’s progressive leadership. Instead of adding all this burden to the teachers, parents, and students, the entire LGBT curriculum should be made opt-in. There is extremely little administrative burden regarding other opt-in subjects such as varsity baseball. Whoever wants to play baseball can. The same arrangement can be made with LGBT studies.
For most of human history we didn’t have superintendents making $330,000/year, we didn’t have boards of education, and we didn’t have teachers’ unions. They are the administrative burden, and nobody needs them.
