CARBONDALE, Colo. – Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter Tuesday to Roaring Fork Schools Board of Education and Superintendent Anna Cole, asking Roaring Fork to immediately discontinue using the 3Rs curriculum—a sexual-education curriculum containing vulgar content and activities aimed at children as young as five years old.
The letter requests that, at minimum, Roaring Fork Schools implement an opt-in procedure that ensures parents can exercise their fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children by automatically exempting all children from the explicit content except for those children whose parents choose to opt in. This follows an outcry from parents over the graphic lessons and the ineffective notice and opt-out procedures offered during the 2025-26 school year.
“Parents have the constitutional right to know what their children are taught about sex, gender, and their own bodies, and to opt out when curriculum conflicts with their beliefs,” said ADF Senior Counsel Kate Anderson, director of the ADF Center for Parental Rights. “Roaring Fork Schools is not only introducing kindergarteners to explicit content but also burying the information from parents and denying them a meaningful choice to opt their children out—by design. It’s understandable why parents are so concerned. Roaring Fork Schools must immediately abandon this controversial sex ed curriculum, or at the very least, allow parents sufficient notice to choose what is best for their family.”
Roaring Fork Schools—serving Glenwood Springs, Carbondale, Basalt, Marble, El Jebel, and Snowmass Village—adopted the 3Rs (Rights, Respect, Responsibility) curriculum, a free program created by Advocates for Youth, in May 2023 after a contentious board vote. In the 3Rs curriculum, kindergarteners are taught explicit anatomical terms and asked how they like to be touched, first graders complete a worksheet on reproduction, and by second grade, once-optional vulgar slides become mandatory. And the curriculum instills gender ideology through all grades.
At the time of the vote, the board dismissed parent objections as “sensational comments” and assured families it had approved the curriculum “with the expectation that there is a clear opt-out system in place for families.”
As ADF explains in its letter, that has not been the parents’ experience. The district specifically chose an opt-out model over an opt-in model to “ensure students have access to health education,” then implemented a messy opt-out scheme: only two weeks’ (or in some schools less) notice, often with misleading labels like “health education” or “puberty” content, delivered inconsistently across schools through take-home folders, e-newsletters, or the Remind app, with, in some cases, no specific lesson date at all. Furthermore, multiple parents who submitted opt-out forms say their children still weren’t pulled from the lessons.
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases, Mahmoud v. Taylor and Mirabelli v. Bonta, clearly affirmed parents’ constitutional right to direct the education, upbringing, and healthcare of their children, including receiving meaningful notice from schools on how to opt their children out.
Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.
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