Thirty months in the coming, the controlling right-wing faction on the Chino Valley Unified School District was vindicated on Monday by the U.S. Supreme Court, which gave strong indication it will side with the district against the virtual monolith of California’s state government and its public education system with regard to the question of minor student privacy vs. parental rights.
It was Chino Valley Unified School District – or more accurately four of its five board members – who led the way in challenging the “progressive” orthodoxy that had been adopted by virtually every one of the State of California’s 1,015 school districts which held that students who at school present themselves as being of a gender different from that one imputed to them at birth are entitled to prevent their parents or legal guardians from knowing about that transition if that is their choice.
A surprisingly well kept secret was that for several years schools furnished students requiring them a “changing room,” an on-campus 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 – 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, they 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.
From 2018 until 2022, the direction of the Chino Valley Unified School District was in the hands, essentially, of a progressive 3-to-2 ruling majority on the school board. In November 2022, with Board Member Joe Shaffer not seeking reelection, Sonja Shaw defeating Christine Gagnier in the Governing Board Area 3 race and Jon Monroe capturing a position on the school board representing Governing Board Area 4, control of the district transitioned to a 4-to-1 right wing ruling coalition on the board. Eight months later, in July 2023, on a 4-to-1 vote the district’s board members 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, put in place by members Shaw, Monroe, James Na, and Andrew Cruz prevailing over Board Member Don Bridge, was groundbreaking, as the district was the first 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 he policy was made, a letter from California Attorney General Rob Bonta to the district board, in which he stated his opposition to the parental notification and vowed to take action against the district if it went forward with parental notification. 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 it 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 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” 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 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 Governor Gavin 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 was raging in state court, Mirabelli vs. Olson, which had been filed on April 27, 1983, was wending its way through federal court. In Mirabelli vs. Olson, 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 filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California against the Escondido Union School District Board of Education, the California State Board of Education, the California Department of Education and State Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond over a district policy which required them to dissemble and outright mislead parents when they were faced with a situation in which students have 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.
The matter was heard by U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez in federal court in San Diego. Ultimately, in a sharp rebuke to Bonta and Thurmond and by extension to Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democrat-dominated legislature in Sacramento and public school educators throughout the state, Judge Benitez on December 22, 2025 in a 52-page decision struck 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.
Heartened by Judge Benitez’s ruling were the majority of the school board in the Chino Valley and board members with nearly a dozen school districts around the state which either questioned the practice of purposely leaving parents in the dark about the in-classroom/on-campus comportment of their own children or explicitly mandated that parents be informed of their children’s putative gender transition and were sued, sanctioned or prevented by state officials and state courts for doing so. In short order, however, their effervescence was flattened when 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.
If that decision goes in favor of Bonta and the State of California and its educational establishment, LiMandri & Jonna LLP/Thomas More Society will most assuredly appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. If the decision goes against Bonta, et. al, a hard decision will need to be made as to whether posing the question of whether placing the privacy rights of minors above the rights of parents in knowing crucial information about their children as they are raising them before the U.S. Supreme Court as it is presently composed will advance the objective of salvaging the State of California’s parental exclusion policy in whole or even part.
A subtle but crucial difference between the Chino Valley Unified School District’s parental notification policy and issues at the heart in the Mirabelli et al. v. Olson et al. case is that the district policy relates to parental notification and a requirement that teachers inform parents if their children comport themselves in a certain way while the lawsuit is based upon teachers’ free speech and freedom-of-religion rights. Judge Benitez’s ruling bridged the gap between parents’ constitutional right to know of sexual orientation issues impacting their children at school and the rights of teachers to resist a school district’s or the state’s imposition of requirements that they dissemble, misrepresent or lie to parents when the subject of sexual orientation of students arises. While the Mirabelli vs. Olson case was originally filed by two teachers against a single school district, it widened when parents were added onto the plaintiff side and the State of California and several of its agencies and institutions were added to the defendant side.
The Supreme Court did not explicitly lift the stay related to teachers, leaving it unclear as whether teachers have the right to inform parents who are in the dark about their children’s comportment at school but do not directly inquire about the issue. The Supreme Court did make clear, however, that if a parent or parents inquire about the subject, faculty members must tell parents whether if their children are exploring or experimenting with employing a gender contrary to their gender identified for them at birth.
Among the members of the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees who were repeatedly rebuffed by state officials in trying to promote parental notification over the last two-and-a-half years, there was a sense of vindication, as the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court exceeds that of the multiple entities – the California Department of Education, the state legislature, the governor and the California Attorney General’s Office – that sought to impose legal restrictions enjoining the district from implementing its own policy.