Article originally titled, “EXCLUSIVE: California School District Forces Students to Room With Trans Classmates to Go on Overnight Trips”.
(Daily Signal)—Students in a Southern California school district could be forced to choose between rooming with a transgender-identifying student or missing out on an overnight school field trip.
If parents complain about their child rooming with a transgender-identifying student of the opposite biological sex, staff in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District listen to the parents’ concerns, then say that the child’s rooming assignment isn’t the parents’ choice, according to emails from 2021 and 2022 obtained by the Center for American Liberty and shared with The Daily Signal.
The only option for students who are uncomfortable staying in a room with transgender students is to opt out of the trip, Sarah Coley, the school district’s administrative director, said in an email to school district employees regarding a sixth-grade science trip.
“You would say to the students/parents, ‘If you have questions about the assignment, please feel free to discuss with me,’” Coley wrote in the email. “Then, if a parent says ‘hey, I don’t want my student with [who],’ you could provide an ear to listen and consider whether the student is a good fit, but the eventual response would be, ‘If you / your student is not comfortable with the rooming assignments and process of staying with other students in a room, then they can elect not to participate in this optional trip.’”
Coley’s email continues: “Parents and students do not get to pick, and saying I don’t want to stay with ‘Susie’ because ‘Susie isn’t a real girl,’ is no different than saying, ‘I don’t want to stay with Sara because Sara is [white/older/non-religious, etc.]’”
Coley, a 2018 graduate of California State University Long Beach, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
A mother who asked to remain anonymous due to concerns about threats to her family told The Daily Signal that parents should be able to assume their child is safe with school officials, but they can’t in the Newport-Mesa district. The mother said she chose to take her children out of the district and homeschool them a few years ago.
“You just have to assume that my child is not safe, which is really scary,” she said. “The school does not have your child’s best interest at heart. They are more concerned with social justice issues.”
Mark Trammell, executive director of the Center for American Liberty, the group that conducted the public records request, criticized what he called the Newport-Mesa school district’s inconsistency in using privacy rights to hide gender identity from parents while ignoring privacy rights in making rooming assignments.
“It is ironic that school districts cite a student’s right to privacy as justification for schools keeping secrets from parents, but completely disregard student privacy rights when forcing girls to room with a boy pretending to be a girl,” Trammell said in an email to The Daily Signal. “Either the right to privacy exists or it doesn’t; schools cannot selectively apply it when it advances their woke political narratives.”
Newport-Mesa is the same school district where a high school promoted an LGBTQ organization that helps minors find referrals for irreversible transgender surgeries and hormone regimens.
Newport Harbor High School in Newport Beach, California, has scannable QR codes in its hallways that take students to an “LGBTQ+ Resources” webpage, including a link to “LGBTQ Affirming Therapy.”
The high school took down its resource page after the publication of The Daily Signal’s report on Wednesday.
Coley also championed “Sexuality and Gender Galaxies” in emails to school district staff members that provide definitions of terms, including “two spirit,” “asexual,” “polysexual,” “clear platonic,” and “androgynous.”
According to the emails, Coley also is the point of contact for “Gender Support Plans,” which ask the person filling out such a form to indicate the level of support of a student’s parents for his or her gender identity. Students ages 12 and older may formulate gender support plans in the Newport-Mesa school district without parental knowledge or consent.
The district hides these Gender Support Plans in a “locked drawer in the admin’s office,” emails show.
In an email Thursday to The Daily Signal, the Newport-Mesa school district denied that it uses such support plans.
“We do not refer students for gender-affirming care nor do we have gender support plans without parental involvement,” public relations officer Annette Franco wrote in the email. “The student-driven resources are intended to complement the essential role that parents play in their children’s lives.”
In another email to district staff, Coley said students as young as 2 years old may be transgender, so the school district should use preferred pronouns for all ages—and respect the wishes of students of all ages to hide his or her gender identity from parents.
“The student’s age is not a factor,” Coley wrote in the email. “For example, children as early as age two are expressing a different gender identity.”
“It is strongly suggested that teachers privately ask transgender or gender nonconforming students at the beginning of the school year how they want to be addressed in class, in correspondence to the home, or at conferences with the student’s parents,” Coley wrote.
The administrator said that intentionally using a student’s given name and personal pronouns instead of their preferred ones qualifies as “harassment.”
“If a member of the school community intentionally uses a student’s incorrect name and pronoun, or persistently refuses to respect a student’s chosen name and pronouns, that conduct should be treated as harassment,” Coley said in the email. “That type of harassment can create a hostile learning environment, violate the transgender student’s privacy rights, and increase that student’s risk for harassment by other members of the school community.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
