When Sara Goodman Confino’s 5-year-old and 8-year-old return to school in Rockville this fall, there will be at least one big change: Their classmates will now legally be able to opt out of reading books with LGBTQIA+ themes. The Supreme Court said so.

“It really makes me sad,” said Confino, a bestselling author and former Montgomery County Public Schools teacher. “When you are allowed to opt out of learning about other people’s lives, you are invalidating their existence. That’s not what public education is supposed to be about.”

On the surface, the decision Friday that allows for parents to exempt their kids on religious grounds might seems better than a ban. These families aren’t saying they object to everyone reading these books, merely that they don’t want their kids to.

But many critics of that stance, including Confino, think the decision is a subtle tool of hate. It keeps kids sheltered from any opinions or realities not their own, and also sends a message to those from LGBTQIA+ families or who are LGBTQIA+ themselves that their lives aren’t worth recognition.

“They’re watching their classmates leave rather than learn about somebody like them,” Confino said. “I can’t even imagine how much harder that has to be to a kid already having a harder time than their classmates.”

I am a parent of a child in Baltimore City Public Schools where, so far, such issues have not yet reached a legal decision. But these rulings are a beacon not just for other school districts. As far as I’m concerned, this is a slippery slope to disallow diverse viewpoints lest they offend somebody.

What now is stopping parents from objecting to books about racism and slavery because they claim their kids are too young to know about such things? I firmly believe that if my kid was old enough to be called a monkey by a non-Black kid, your kid is old enough to learn not to do that.

I also don’t believe that simply giving parents the option to pull their kids out of lessons they don’t like is benign. Confino said that teachers have to come up with alternative lessons. “That’s always fun because teachers aren’t overworked or anything,” she said.

To me, this ruling is a legal tool to allow students to self-segregate while still going to school for free, rather than just be homeschooled or require their parents to pay for private school. These children are not going to learn about the worth of people who have different religions, and probably other races, sexualities or opinions, at home. If they can simply close their ears in school, they’ll look at their classmates who are different than them with indifference and ignorance.

Look, as a parent, I think it’s important to know what my kid is learning. But I want them to know more, not less. I was privileged to be raised in a diverse school district where we learned about Black history — where I read Richard Wright’s “Native Son” as a high school junior.

I don’t recall a lot of LGBTQIA+ content, but it would have expanded my horizons. Denying such lessons narrows those horizons, and I think that’s what the parents who brought this lawsuit want. They are comfortable with their dim, limited corner of the world and the separation and hate their kids will carry into the larger community.

“To make it so your kids don’t understand what some of their classmates’ lives look like creates more problems down the line, creates fights, creates tension,” Confino said. “It’s not saying, ‘Your family has to be like this,’ but, ‘These families exist.’”

During her 21 years as a Montgomery County teacher, Confino dealt with questions from parents about book choices. As a Jewish person herself, she heard Jewish parents’ concern about Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” because “it felt too intense at that moment” for their kids. Some parents said she was “promoting witchcraft and Satanism” when she brought up Harry Potter. But those complaints were few and far between.

Schools are incredibly important as our children will spend most of their waking hours there, away from us. I understand concerns about indoctrination. Indeed, I believe I learned harmful lies about, say, Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to equality when he didn’t support that at all, or how the failure of Reconstruction was shoved into a few paragraphs in my high school history book.

A curriculum that expands that history, that presents people different than my family and I as just as normal as anyone else, is important to me. To say that LGBTQIA+ people are a problem to be avoided is going backwards.

We are going backwards.

“This makes these kids feel so ostracized, as if there is something wrong with their families,” Confino said.

I fear that this is the point.