Emboldened by a few recent victories it has experienced with regard to related issues and a political shift in Washington, D.C. away from the so-called wokeism that predominated during the immediate past presidential administration, the Chino Valley Unified School District on April 17 directed the district’s lawyers to prepare lawsuits challenging the State of California’s imposition of policies relating to transgender students.
One of the suits, which had already been tentatively drafted, allege the State of California through policies put in place and advocated by California Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond, ones advocated by Governor Gavin Newsom, a lawsuit filed against the district by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and legislation passed by the California legislature violated a federal act protecting families. The other propounds that the California Interscholastic Federation violated Title IX by allowing transgender athletes in female sports.
The Chino Valley Unified School District over the past decade-and-a-half has demonstrated itself to be on the cutting edge of challenges to the predominant philosophical orientation in California, where the Democrats and in particular the liberal wing of the Democratic Party hold the upper hand in the state capital, as the Democrats hold supermajorities in the California Assembly and State Senate and occupy the governor’s mansion and hold the lieutenant governorship, and the offices of California attorney general, superintendent of public education, California Secretary of State, Insurance Commissioner, State Treasurer, State Controller.
Early in the second decade of the Third Millennium, a three-member majority on the Chino valley Unified School District Board of Trustees, consisting of Sylvia Orozco, James Na and Andrew Cruz, Republicans all, sought and for a short time succeeded in permitting prayer in an academic and district board meeting setting. That policy was undone, when the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation challenged the prayer policy in court. For a short time thereafter, with Sylvia Orozco’s departure from the board following her unsuccessful electoral bid for the Chino City Council, a secular controlling majority on the council centered around Democratic lawyer Christine Gagnier, asserted itself. Gagnier was being groomed by forces within the Democratic Party as a future legislator at either the state or federal level or both. In 2022, despite intensive Democratic support, Gagnier was voted out of office and Sonja Shaw, a standard bearer of both the religious right and the Republican Party in the Chino Valley community, was voted into office, taking Gagnier’s place.
In short order, Shaw, with the support of Na and Cruz, who remain on the school board and Jon Monroe, a member of the San Bernardino County Republican Central Committee, was elevated to board president. With the backing of Na, Cruz and Monroe, Shaw pushed senior district staff to dispense with a good number of what her support network considered to be liberal claptrap, including the flying of gay pride flags on school campuses. The board then took a hard look at the practice, nearly universal in the Golden State’s public school system, of allowing school campuses to be sanctuaries for students of what was traditionally considered to be alternative sexual orientations to openly indulge their sexual identities in an academic setting without fear of exposure outside of that setting. This included the provision of on-campus “change rooms” where students, who had departed from home wearing attire consistent with their birth gender could change into clothes associated with the opposite gender and throughout the school day maintain that sexual identity, then go to the change room to redon the clothes they had left home in and return to their familial setting, thereby preventing their parents knowing or discovering the dual nature of their gender diversion. Instead of banning the changing rooms or preventing male students from assuming the guise of females while at school or disallowing girls to take on the outer representation of themselves as boys, the district in July 2023, on a 4-to-1 vote with Shaw, Na, Cruz and Monroe prevailing over Board Member Don Bridge, adopted a parental notification policy, whereby the district’s teachers were required to inform parents within three days if one of their children assumed a gender identity different from the sexual identification they were given at birth and/or what appeared on his or her birth certificate.
That parental notification policy was groundbreaking, as the district was the first in the state to codify such a policy. In addition, the board majority, which is not shy about its beliefs and philosophy, openly adopted the policy, doing so with much fanfare. This brought, before the vote to adopt he policy was made, a letter from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a letter of opposition in which he vowed to take action against the district if it adopted such a policy and attempted to enforce it. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, concerned that Chino Valley Unified’s action in this regard might touch off a contagious round of similar policy adoptions in districts throughout the state, flew down from Sacramento to lobby against the policy at the board meeting when the policy was voted upon. Both Bonta and Thurmond characterized the policy as one that was hostile to the interests of the transsexual community, and they emphasized that many transsexual youths have parents who would be unaccepting of their life choices and would potentially subject them to physical and psychological abuse if they learned that they had assumed a variant gender.
Despite the opposition, the board majority adopted the policy. A little more than a month later, just as the 2023-24 school year was about to get under way, Bonta, in his capacity as California attorney general, sued the Chino Valley Unified School District in an effort to prevent it from implementing the policy it had adopted, and stem the trend of other districts elsewhere in the state adopting similar policies. In filing that suit, Bonta characterized the policy as “destructive” and “downright dangerous,” while asserting that the policy “puts transgender and gender nonconforming students in danger of imminent, irreparable harm from the consequences of forced disclosures” and that as a consequence of the school district action, such students were “under threat’’ and “in fear,” facing “the risk of emotional, physical, and psychological harm from non-affirming or unaccepting parents or guardians.” The policy, according to the attorney general “unlawfully discriminates against transgender and gender nonconforming students, subjecting them to disparate treatment, harassment, and abuse, mental, emotional, and physical.”
Bonta asserted that the need to prevent “mental harm, emotional harm and physical harm” to those students who are products of families who are not accepting of their choice to deviate from their birth or biological gender trumps the right of all parents to be informed of their children’s sexual identity choice.
Bonta’s filing put the new policy on hold and on September 6, 2023, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Thomas Garza granted the State of California a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Chino Valley Unified School District from enforcing the policy.
Ultimately, the matter was transferred to the courtroom of San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael Sachs. Judge Sachs, reacting to Bonta’s claim that the district’s forced disclosure provisions discriminate against transgender students who are “singled out” and that it ran afoul of California Education Code Sections 200 and 220 and Government Code section 11135 meant to ensure equal rights and opportunities for every student and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression, perpetuated the restraining order preventing the policy’s enforcement. According to Judge Sachs, the provision of the policy requiring that faculty in essence “out” transgender students to their parents was discriminatory based on sex, violating both the California Constitution’ and U.S Constitution’s equal protection clauses.
In making his ruling, however, Sachs stated that the provision of the policy which pertained to informing parents whenever an alteration of their children’s transcripts or official records were altered fell within the rubric of the U.S. Constitution. The district took that guidance to heart and in March 2024 revamped the policy, making no mention of sexuality or gender transition, instead mandating that parents be notified when their children’s official school records were changed. This, from a practical standpoint, was inclusive of the intent contained in the policy adopted in July 2023 was inclusive of the intent contained in the policy adopted in July 2023, achieving what the advocates of parental disclosure wanted, while maneuvering around the legal constraints Bonta had constructed.
In a sure sign that Shaw, Na, Cruz and Monroe had scored a victory and hit a nerve, state officials then moved to preempt parental disclosure altogether by having Assembly Member Chris Ward, D-San Diego, author AB 1955, prohibiting schools from making a practice of notifying parents if their children are assuming a gender different from the one assigned them at birth. The bill was passed by both of California’s legislative houses and was signed into law by Governor Newsom on Monday, July 15, 2024.
Almost as soon as Governor Newsom’s signature was dry, the Chino Valley Unified School District and parents Oscar Avila, Monica Botts, Jason Craig, Kristi Hays, Cole Mann, Victor Romero, Gheorghe Rosca, Jr. and Leslie Sawyer, represented by attorney Emily Ray of the Austin, Texas-based Liberty Justice Center, sued Newsom, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond in an effort to prevent the enforcement of AB 1955.
As this legal back-and-forth has been raging in state court, a federal lawsuit, Mirabelli vs. Olson, relating to a teacher in the Escondido School District suing the district in which she worked over its order that she not inform the parents of one of her students about the name she used in a classroom setting to refer to their child, was playing out. That case had implications that not only paralleled the issues of contention between Bonta and the Chino Valley Unified School District but replicated them with some level of specificity. Ultimately, in that case, Federal Judge Roger Benitez delivered a ruling in favor of the teacher, Elizabeth Mirabelli, ruling that what the school district was doing was tantamount to forcing Miribelli – and other teachers in the district – to lie to parents. In delivering his ruling, Judge Benitz mention Chino Valley Unified’s parental notification policy and essentially vindicated the Chino Valley Unified School District in its intention to keep parents abreast of the activity and behavior their children engage in while in a public school setting. One theme in Judge Benitez’s rulings is that a school district or educators to whom parents have entrusted their children cannot be actively deceived by the district or those educators, which was precisely the position Shaw, Na, Cruz and Monroe had taken in passing its parental notification policy.
Meanwhile, the Chino Valley Unified School District and Shaw, in particular, have garnered substantial national attention over the position the district has taken with regard to protecting parent’s rights and ensuring that before a student under the age of majority assuming a variant gender identity takes a meaningful step toward permanentizing that gender transition with surgery, castration, mastectomy, the use of hormone blockers or engaging in chemical castration, his or her parents are informed that their offspring is about to undergo what the advocates of gender reassignment call “gender affirming” treatment and what the opponents of gender reassignment call “gender alteration.”
In is in the limelight over these developments that Shaw, who last month announced she is going to run for California Superintendent of Public Education to succeed Thurmond, and her three board colleagues with whom she is in league this week voted to initiate the two federal suits.
The state legislature, the California attorney general and the current state superintendent of public schools overstepped their authority in seeking to force the district to abandon keeping parents informed about what their children are engaging in while at school, Shaw said. While she favors local control and would have preferred to stay out of court altogether and certainly does not relish lodging suit in federal court, she said, California’s liberal politicians had given the district no other option.
She also said the district was “asking President Trump to intervene. We shouldn’t have to find a gray area to operate within,” meaning the district had to take recourse in finding the loophole relating to telling parents about any changes in their records in order to let them know they are assuming a different gender.
Shaw’s board colleague emphasized the suit relating to keeping students born biological males from competing against girls in athletic contests intended for girls alone.
“Men and women are biologically different,” Monroe said. “When a male transitions to a female and competes in a female sport, it is not fair.”
Steven Frazer, the president of Associated Chino Teachers, said that Monroe is focused on exclusivity rather than inclusivity. “Title IX was passed to expand the rights of girls and women,” Frazer said, indicating that if a man makes a decision to be a woman, that choice should be respected by everyone, including the women who compete with them on the athletic field, the school district, the schools’ athletic leagues, the State of California and all of its residents.
Shaw, Na, Cruz and Monroe are a bunch of close-minded bigots, one lesbian said.
Transgender students have a right to privacy, a lesbian-bisexual-gay-queer-transgender advocate said, and no one has a right to out them. Others said that public schools are public places and if a boy insists he is a girl or if a girl insists he is a boy, it is unrealistic to expect that will remain a secret.