By Neeraja Deshpande | September 8, 2026
(Independent Women’s Features)
Allison Roberts questioned politics in her son’s elementary school, which led to her ban from school property. Now she’s taking the district to court, and urging other parents to speak up.
Oregon mother Allison Roberts grew up in North Portland in the 80s and 90s, clubbing on what’s now Harvey Milk Street, named after the gay-rights activists.
“We were on the frontier of all of it,” Roberts recalled. “We are, you know, the movers, shakers, and innovators. It’s Greece, it’s Portland, it’s San Francisco.”
But with kids of her own, seeing Portland become littered with more and more pride flags has given her pause.
“It just started looking unauthentic, not the authentic Portland I’m used to,” she told IW Features.
And especially when it came to her son’s school throwing those flags up, she added, “It looked agenda-driven.”
It started with a bench outside her 10-year-old son’s elementary school, repainted from a normal rainbow pride flag to a “progressive pride” flag, with extra stripes for Black Lives Matter and transgenderism. Then, about a month in, her son, who loves G.I. Joes and trucks, came home with a worksheet: a flower with blank petals labeled with words like “gender,” “religion,” “ethnicity,” and “race.” The word “gender” in particular bothered her, as it is “kind of a triggering word these days,” she said.
“All of these were questions that I feel are very provocative,” she told IW Features. “There’s not a world where anybody can tell me that you are not ripe for indoctrination and you’re not fraught with confusion at that age. Whether you’re conservative or liberal, you should be if your child is being taught how to think or what to think.”
Beyond that, she worries about the kids left off that flower, so to speak.
“Every kid wants to feel special,” she said. “And when you see medals going out to other people for immutable characteristics…in their honor, of course, a child wants to be honored as well. A human wants to. We all have egos and children have fragile ones. And so it is, for all of its inclusivity, I see it as extraordinarily exclusive.”
So, Roberts started asking questions—first to the the school’s principal about the “progressive pride” bench, and then to the Parent-Teachers Association about the identity flower assignment.
For months, she was told she’d first have to go through a committee before she’d be allowed to speak at a PTA meeting. But Roberts pushed back, arguing that unless the district could show her that other parents, or PTA presidents, had ever been made to do the same, she should be able to speak. No one could.
Then came the anonymous emails, she said, from parents who disagreed with her politics but wanted her to know that PTA leadership was discussing her behind closed doors, and had decided they didn’t want her speaking.
“I was barred,” she said.
This led her to join the PTA outright and pay her PTA dues…
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