Man holding sign at Feb. 15, 2025 Parents Rights rally in Olympia, WA ©Photo by Carleen Johnson
(The Center Square) – Let’s Go Washington, a political action committee founded by businessman Brian Heywood, launched two new initiatives to the state Legislature on Monday morning. One concerns parental rights, and the other concerns protecting girls in sports.
“The first one will be an appeal of [House Bill] 1296 essentially; 1296 is the legislative gutting of [Initiative] 2081, which was the parents’ bill of rights,” Heywood told The Center Square last week. “It focused on making sure that parents knew what was going on with their kids at school, and schools not having the authority or the ability to keep secrets from parents.”
I-2081 was passed by Washington lawmakers during the 2024 session, but majority party Democrats returned during the 2025 session with HB 1296, which supporters contended was about protecting student privacy and rights.
“It completely gutted all the parental rights parts of 2081,” Heywood reiterated. “And they did something that is called log rolling, where they added two other bills onto 1296. If a school has done something wrong to your kid or the school district has done something wrong to your kid, they added a whole bunch of requirements that you have to go through before you can ever take a school or a teacher to court for having done something egregious.”
Heywood noted that HB 1296 also granted Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal permission to withhold funds from schools that don’t comply with OSPI’s directives, even if those directives conflict with federal law.
“I think we’re in a death spiral if we don’t make changes. If you’re a single mom, you work in maybe a couple of jobs trying to make … ends meet, and you’ve got limited time and stuff’s going on at school … and you don’t know,” he continued. “They’re making this case that teachers know better than you do what’s good for your kid. That’s not an aspersion on all teachers. They’re doing a noble job and noble work, but when you have laws that allow bad actors to do bad things, I think it’s incumbent, and it’s really essential, that parents have the right to be involved and to be informed and get the information.”
Heywood described the other initiative.
“It’s a very simple initiative,” he said. “And it basically says the law already requires student athletes to get a physical from their doctor, or from their healthcare provider, before they can play in sports. And that already requires them to have a biological declaration of male or female. So, the initiative says using that already existing requirement, if you’re going to play in a sport that’s designated for females, you have to have this record that’s already required for you just to play sports that shows that you’re a female in order to play in a female sport. And essentially it would keep biological males out of female sports.”
In April, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice launched a formal investigation into OSPI over concerns that the agency may be enforcing policies that violate federal law when it comes to allowing biological males to participate in girls’ and women’s sports and use female-only facilities.
“I think that Washington state is out of alignment with what’s going on in the rest of the country,” Heywood noted. “They’re pushing an ideology that is incredibly unfair to girls in sports.”
The Center Square asked Heywood about spending a great deal of time and money on initiative efforts that could easily be undone once again by lawmakers or the courts.
“My answer to that is, what’s the alternative? We give up and we just accede to whatever they’re doing?” he asked. “I don’t think that’s an option here. I think you have to fight back for what’s right. And in this case, they’re on the wrong side of history on this.”
Ahead of LGW publicly announcing any specifics about the two initiatives, The Center Square reached out to the Washington State Democratic Party on Friday to see if it had any comments in general.
“No matter what Let’s Go Washington will announce, we know that it will be a huge waste of time, money, and something that Washington voters will reject,” WSDP Communications Director Stephen Reed, said in an email.
Rep. Travis Couture, R-Allyn, vehemently opposed HB 1296. He spoke with The Center Square about the LGW initiatives.
“When you turn schools into your personal ideological social engineering playground so you can create mindless robots who don’t know how to read and do math, but know how to express all 57 progressive fake genders, then the Democrats and the progressives have won, because these kids have been conditioned and engineered to agree with them on radical social issues that are honestly destroying masculinity,” he said. “We’re ruining a generation of kids and setting them up for failure, and that’s what breaks my heart the most.”
Heywood said LGW will use paid signature gatherers and volunteers for both initiatives.
“We need about 309,000 [signatures], but we’re going to shoot for about 400,000 signatures and people can go on the website at letsgowashington.com and they can ask us for sheets of paper, and we’ll send it to them. We’re trying to make it as convenient for everybody as possible, said Heywood.
