This article aims to document, at the local level, the positions of the school’s stakeholders about the call for a day of withdrawal from school, in the name of opposing ‘gender theory’. While the issue at the heart of the controversy is sexual education at school, which seems to entail a possible destabilization of heteronormativity, the initiative to withdraw children from public school to contest public programs promoting gender equality also plays out the tension between the respective educational roles of school and family, and raises the question of citizenship in the context of race relations. This results in the creation of an alternative public space where democratic debate occurs, at the margins of the school institution.