Family · Santa Fe, NM Metro · August 29, 2026
Santa Fe Schools Add Parental Consent, Still Withhold Facility Notice
What Alinsky tactic is being used
3 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 3
“Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
The district's answer to Kristy Borrero Ojinaga was not a defense of the arrangement but a jurisdictional one: FERPA means "we are only entitled to information about our own child." That moves the argument off ground parents know — a six-year-old followed into a restroom — and onto federal records law, plus an internal instrument, the "Gender Support Plan," that parents have never read. A mother arguing from conviction loses that exchange every time, not because she is wrong but because she is on unfamiliar terrain.
Counter-Rule 3 · Preparation and Width
Prepare the unfamiliar ground before you are dragged onto it. "I don't know, I'll find out and come back" beats an improvised answer.
Read the actual thing before the meeting: the Department of Education's parent guide to FERPA (studentprivacy.ed.gov) is short and says plainly that FERPA governs disclosure of records, not whether a school must respond to misconduct. Then request your district's written Gender Support Plan policy with its policy number and adoption date, and read it before you speak. If asked something you don't know at the microphone, say "I'll find out and come back" rather than improvising a legal claim.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
Liberty Counsel's move was not a general argument about gender but a demand that the district be held to rules it already accepts — Title IX and its own published process — filed as a civil rights complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in March. The district then conceded exactly the point where the gap was widest and least defensible: students alone deciding whether parents were told. The narrow, documented gap produced the August 20 change; the broader complaint did not.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
Before you assert a gap in your own district, verify it in the text: get the policy, the procedure, the parent-handbook page, and quote the sentence, not your memory of it. Check the same standard against institutions you belong to — does your church or Christian school actually notify parents before overnight or facility arrangements change, in writing, or only in practice? Close that gap first; a demand you have already met is very hard to answer.
Rule 9
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
Mat Staver's stated leverage is that the district "still risks losing federal funding and DOJ litigation." That threat is doing real work in this story — it is what makes the district's August 20 revision look like a retreat — but nothing in the record shows funding has been withdrawn from anyone, and OCR complaints ordinarily take many months and end in agreements, not defunding.
Counter-Rule 9 · Courageous Realism
Name the worst case out loud and cost it honestly. Fear of the unnamed is doing most of the work.
Name the worst case honestly to yourself: the complaint may sit for a year and close without a finding, and your district may change nothing. Cost that out and plan for it, so your ask is something you can win locally — a written answer on facility notice, entered in the minutes — rather than waiting on Washington. Do not repeat the defunding threat as if it were imminent; per the Department of Education, an OCR complaint must generally be filed within 180 days of the alleged discrimination, so the timeline that matters is yours.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
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