School Chief Just Can't Believe He Had To Reassure Parents Kids Don't Use Litter Boxes

MIDLAND, MI — As the culture wars around gender identity ramp up, a school superintendent in central Michigan found it necessary to make a statement on social media that students who identify as cats won’t have to use litter boxes.

“It is unconscionable that this afternoon I am sending this communication,” Midland Public Schools Superintendent Michael Sharrow wrote in a community message Thursday. “There is no truth whatsoever to this false statement/accusation! There have never been litter boxes within MPS schools.”

Wait. What?

The origin of the, ahem, furfluffle can be traced back to a Dec. 20 school board meeting.

At about the 33-minute mark in this YouTube video, local parent Lisa Hansen began discussing what in her opinion is a “somewhat nefarious” national agenda being pushed on students.

Of local interest, Hansen insisted, are policies that she claims accommodate students who identify as “furries,” or cats and dogs.

“Yesterday I heard something, and I was stunned, and today I am equally stunned and a little bit upset. Well, not a little bit, a lot a bit upset — furious; I would even use that word,” Hansen said. “I heard that at least one of our schools in our town has a, in one of the unisex bathrooms, a litter box for the kids that identify as cats. And um, I am really disturbed by that.”

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“Furry” is an evolving word once exclusively used as an adjective meaning “consisting of fur,” according to Merriam-Webster, but now can be used to describe “people who have a keen interest in, or even dress up as, anthropomorphic animal characters, like those often seen in comics, games and cartoons.”

In a word, Sharrow told community members that if it sounds too wacky to be true, it probably is.

“In this divisive/contentious world in which we currently find ourselves, I ask that if you hear wild accusations that don’t sound like something in which your Midland Public Schools Board of Education, Administration, District would be part, take a moment to send an MPSConnect message to me,” he wrote, providing the MPSConnect link.

As if to prove the superintendent’s point, commenters piled on, asking among other questions why the superintendent didn’t address the issue of furries in schools.

“It doesn’t matter what a kid dresses like,” one person wrote, adding it “doesn’t mean they are [taking care of business] in a litter box.”

“Clothing is one thing,” someone else replied, “but walking around on all fours hissing and scratching at people is a whole nother issue that is being ignored.”

The trend toward acting like a cat or dog is real, even if the Midland school litter box is the hoax du jour.

At an October Midland school board meeting, an eighth grader said she was “confused, as a student, why kids are walking around acting like cats and dogs.”

Speaking at about the 1:30-minute mark, she described a student who walked around the school with a long cat tail, cat ears and "little bells that jingled everywhere she went."

“I was also walking down the hallway three weeks ago when a boy wearing dog ears barked at me and my friend as we passed,” she said, adding the boy left the school building on all fours.

“I don’t understand why these kids are acting so un-human and not happy with themselves,” she said. “These things just made me feel uncomfortable and so unnecessary as to why they’re barking at me, and it’s very distracting during school days."

In Kentucky earlier this school year, officials were perplexed by a group of middle school students who dressed and acted like cats, apparently after accepting a social media challenge, according to a report by news station WLWT.

Other students felt threatened by the furries, who would “hiss at you and scratch at you if they don’t like something you’re doing,” the report said.

The superintendent at the school in Kentucky told WLWT the students violated the dress code, and that the administration had addressed the situation.

Psychologists say furries aren’t the deviants they’re sometimes represented to be. The trend isn’t new, but has recently been popularized on social media.

“Regardless of what you have or have not heard about furries, it might surprise you to learn that there is a team of researchers who have devoted their careers to studying this fandom,” Hal Herzog wrote for Psychology Today’s “Animals and Us” column in 2017.

“Perhaps even more surprising is what nearly a decade of research on the subject can tell us all about how we relate to animals, how we understand ourselves, and how we benefit from letting the inner child run wild every so often.”

Some commenting on the situation in Midland questioned why the superintendent posted a message denouncing the litter boxes as a hoax on a Facebook page for emergency communications.

“Opposing public figures is an emergency these days.” someone pointed out. “Now all the nutters can say ‘see, this never happened, here's the emergency declaration from the [superintendent] saying so.’ ”