Three years after Chino Valley Unified School District adopted California’s first parental notification policy and then did much of the heavy lifting required to break the momentum of resistance to that change within the state’s public education, legislative, legal and court systems to keep that policy from being de-instituted, the Redlands school board is replicating that move.
Over the last decade, a secret that has been well kept from millions of parents of children attending California’s public schools is that at junior high school and high school campuses, students have been furnished with a “changing room,” a facility in which a student who had departed from home wearing clothes traditionally associated with his or her biological gender could change into clothes which by current stylistic and fashion trends are identified with the opposite gender and where, at the end of the school day, the student could change back into the clothes he or she was wearing upon leaving home that morning. Moreover, schools and teachers in California were required to treat transgender students according to their gender identity, addressing those students while on campus and in the classroom by the name and pronouns – she or he, him or her – or the proper first name each student specified. Further, while teachers were called upon to use the names and pronouns of the student’s choosing or preference in daily school room settings, those teachers were required, when meeting in person with the parents of a transgender student during back-to-school nights or parent-teacher conferences or in any written communications with the parents or their guardians, to refer to the students by the names given to them by their parents and make no mention of the student’s change in gender identity on campus.
On July 22, 2023, the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees voted 4-to-1 to adopt 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 significant on multiple levels. It drew attention to the existence of the changing rooms and the general approach of the vast majority of the state’s 1,015 public school districts took with regard to transgenderism on the part of students. Well in excess of 90 percent of the parents of high school and junior high school students in the state previously had no idea that changing rooms existed. The Chino Valley Unified School District adoption of the parental notification policy let that cat out of the bag. Moreover, Chino Valley Unified’s action was groundbreaking, as it was the first district in the state to codify such a requirement. In adopting the policy, the board majority did so openly and with much fanfare. This resulted in, before the vote to adopt the policy was made, efforts by the Democratic Party establishment in Sacramento, extending to Governor Gavin Newsom, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and members of the legislature seeking to dissuade the school board from adopting the policy.
Despite the opposition, the board majority adopted the policy. A little more than a month later, just as the 2023-24 school year was getting 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, and stem the trend of other districts elsewhere in the state from following suit. 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” about their sexuality 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, permanentized 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’s 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 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, achieving what the advocates of parental disclosure wanted, while maneuvering around the legal constraints Bonta had constructed.
In a sure sign that the Chino Valley Unified School District Board 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 Assembly Bill 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 Governor Newsom, California Attorney General Bonta and California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond in an effort to prevent the enforcement of AB 1955.
Despite suggestions by Newsom, Bonta, Thurmond and the California public education establishment that the Chino Valley Unified School district was an outlier and far out of the mainstream with regard to its unwillingness to simply accept that adolescents should be free to engage in transgenderism without the knowledge or interference of their parents, what was occurring in the Chino Valley was not taking place in a vacuum. For one, after Chino Valley Unified’s July 2023 vote to adopt the parental notification policy, more than a dozen other school boards in California initiated discussions about the subject and four others followed through with adopting similar policies before the legislature sought to outlaw them with Assembly Bill 1955. Even more significantly, action pertaining to parents’ rights to information regarding the sexual reidentification of their children was playing out in the venue of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California at the same time. Developments in that case, unexpectedly and serendipitously, would converge with what was ongoing in the state court case in which Chino Valley Unified was challenging AB 1955 to undermine the upper hand California’s Democratic establishment enjoyed with regard to propounding the transgenderist ethos in the state’s schools.
The case that was already being heard in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez in federal court in San Diego when the Chino Valley Unified School Board passed the parental notification policy was that of Mirabelli vs. Olson, which had been brought by Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, middle school teachers in the Escondido Union School District, together with a group of parents who were not identified by name. That suit, being heard in the venue of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, named Mark Olson, the president of the Escondido Union School District Board of Education, the other members of the Escondido Union School District Board of Education, the Escondido Union School District, the California State Board of Education, the California Department of Education and State Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond over a district policy which required Miribelli and West and the other teachers in the Escondido Union School District to dissemble and outright mislead parents when they were faced with a situation in which students had assumed a gender at a variance with their natural sex. The suit contended that California school districts, in accordance with guidance provided by the California Department of Education, forced teachers to deceive parents if a student requested to go by a new name or pronouns at school.
The lawsuit stated teachers were required to use “any pronouns or a gender-specific name requested by the student during school, while reverting to biological pronouns and legal names when speaking with parents in order to actively hide information about their child’s gender identity from them.”
Mirabelli and West contended in the suit that their First Amendment rights were violated by the district in its requirement that they lie to parents.
After considering the matter and multiple court hearings, briefings and other submissions, over the course of more than two-and-a-half-years, Judge Benitez, ultimately, on December 22, 2025 in a 52-page decision sharply rebuked Bonta and Thurmond and by extension to Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democrat-dominated legislature in Sacramento and public school educators throughout the state by striking down California schools’ policies preventing teachers from informing parents if their offspring while on campus are assuming a gender identity at a variance with that assigned them as a consequence of their outward biology at birth.
Judge Benitez declared so-called “parental exclusion policies” to be unconstitutional and an inherent violation of parents’ rights.
Judge Benitez’s order granted summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs, and he issued a permanent injunction effectively preventing schools or school districts from stopping teachers from disclosing to parents the gender identity their children have adopted in a school or classroom setting or in any way punishing those teachers for doing so. The injunction prevented schools from requiring that teachers or educators lie to parents.
The ruling applied to all public-school districts in California, eradicating the parental exclusion policies in place in other California school districts.
Judge Benitez’s ruling and order had direct and tremendous bearing on not only the decisions made in state court, obviating the finding and ruling by Judge Sachs, but impacting the suit brought by the Chino Valley Joint Unified School District in July 2024 and rendering AB 1955 unenforceable. The injunction granted by Judge Benitez in Mirabelli et al. v. Olson et al. was a practical bar to the government in general, California state officials and California school employee preventing parents from being cut off from information pertaining to their children or being able to oversee the medical treatment their children receive.
Somewhat predictably, Attorney General Bonta, on his own behalf and representing Thurmond and the California Department of Education, Governor Newsom, the state legislature and the vast majority of California’s public school districts, appealed Judge Benitez’ ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Thereupon, the Ninth Circuit, in agreeing to hear Bonta’s appeal, granted the state a stay pending the appeal while it is being heard.
In response, the lawyers for Mirabella and West, along with the parents who had joined in the suit, consisting of the law firm of LiMandri & Jonna LLP and the Thomas More Society, a conservative Roman Catholic public interest law firm based in Chicago, made an immediate appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking an early resolution of the dispute with regard to Judge Benitez’s ruling and asking that the stay issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit be lifted.
Under the LiMandri & Jonna LLP/Thomas More Society request, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to reinstitute Judge Benitez’s restraining order while the California Attorney General’s appeal was being considered.
In a response that was made somewhat more quickly than many anticipated, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Judge Benitez’s order to remain in effect and signaled the State of California’s parental exclusion policy is not likely to withstand the test of federal court system scrutiny.
Though the Supreme Court’s March 2 response to the LiMandri & Jonna LLP/Thomas More Society request did not constitute a decision unequivocally upholding Judge Benitez, it provided an indication that six of the nine Supreme Court justices are disposed to accepting his reasoning with regard to parental rights pretty much straight down the line, and that his decision in Mirabelli et al. v. Olson et al. will be sustained, such that in relatively short order parental disclosure rather than parental exclusion will be the law of the land, trumping California educational system policy, which aggressively favors the rights of children to be selectively secretive with regard to their sexuality, extending to preventing their parents from being aware of how they comport themselves at school.
The Supreme Court, by a 6-to-3 margin, with justices Elaine Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissenting, said that in the head-on dispute over the right of parents to be informed about what is happening with their children overcomes the state’s ability to protect the privacy rights of children. The Supreme Court action allows Benitez’s injunction to remain in effect while the appeals process channels through its myriad steps to a penultimate decision. Whatever the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, it is very likely the matter will be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, in state court, Chino Valley’s own parental notification policy, requiring notification for official/unofficial record changes, was upheld in September 2024, and Attorney General Bonta chose not to appeal, effectively ending the state’s legal challenge to that policy. This allowed Chino Valley to continue enforcing its updated policy.
In Redlands, as in the Chino Valley, there is a sizable contingent of the population and parents of children attending school in the Redlands Unified School District who are in intense, and in some cases bitter, disagreement with the parental exclusion policy that is favored by public education establishment in California, the overwhelming majority of school districts in the state, the Democratic Party establishment in Sacramento, Governor Gavin Newsom, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and members of the state legislature, wherein both the lower and upper houses have a supermajority of Democrats. At the same time, there are students, parents and teachers in the Redlands Unified School District who are advocates of the parental exclusion policy, who insist the district’s schools should be a safe haven for students who have come to the conclusion that they are ill-cast in their biological framework and should be at liberty to present themselves to their schoolmates and their school’s faculty as members of the opposite gender without having their parents know about it. Of note, is that three of the Redlands Unified School District’s five board members – Michelle Rendler, Candy Olson and Jeanette Wilson – are of the opinion that if students are assuming a sexual identity different from the one assigned them at birth based upon their sexual organs, their parents have, or should have, a right to be made aware of that.
At its Tuesday, July 21, meeting, the Redlands Unified School District board, with one of its board members, Patty Holohan, not in attendance, took up the subject of a parental notification policy.
During discussion of the item, Board Member Melissa Ayala-Quintero weighed in against the idea, while Board President Michele Rendler and board members Candy Olson and Jeanette Wilson indicated they were inclined in favor of keeping parents informed of their children’s comportment and self-presentation at school.
Ultimately, the board, based on Rendler’s, Olson’s and Wilson’s direction and understanding of the ordeal that the Chino Valley Unified School District underwent in the effort to sustain its parental notification policy, called for the district’s legal counsel to draft a document relating to the policy requiring parental notification and to provide further guidance relating to the adoption of that policy for presentation at the board’s upcoming August 11 meeting.