I’d personally go farther, and say that policy should be that any employee that chose to refer to any student as Student [Surname] should do so for all of their students for consistency. But I’m a bit of a hard ass.

“Student [Surname]” seems like a reasonable accommodation to me! And “your student” during a parent conference is perfectly fine. How often do you use third-person pronouns, really?

Whatever the right wording is, something like, “employees are prohibited from using pronouns for a student that do not match those in guidelines [references a, b, c, etc]” but the policy *only* covers what they are prohibited from doing, and compels them to do nothing.

*incorrect pronouns. They can choose to use correct pronouns, or continue to follow the policy and abstain from incorrect pronouns and stop using all pronouns. If ”they” is not an incorrect pronoun, they can use it.

Right, I’m not saying mandating the use of correct pronouns, but prohibiting the use of incorrect ones. If the policy only says “don’t use incorrect pronouns” and only talks about the negative case, nothing is compelled. That employee no longer gets to use pronouns.

Couldn’t you invert it and prohibit the use incorrect pronouns? Either the employee uses the correct pronouns, or they always refer to the student as “Student [Surname]” and never use pronouns. No speech is compelled.

That show was sheer elegance in its simplicity.

Two questions: 1. Is there a young girl with her little sister asleep on her back waiting for a bus next to you? and 2. Have you been a secret Totoro this whole time?