In less than a month, three federal court rulings have strengthened the Chino Valley Unified School District’s position in what once seemed a quixotic battle with multiple layers of the state’s bureaucracy over parental notification.
Victories in what is considered by many to be a basic element in the conservative-liberal cultural war playing out throughout the country have been mounting on the school district’s side of the ledger, while less than three years ago, the district and its far-right leaning school board could not notch a single win.
In July 2023, Chino Valley Unified School District – or more accurately four of its five board members – challenged what was for them a “progressive” orthodoxy that had been adopted by virtually every one of the State of California’s 1,015 school districts. That doctrine 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 personal privacy to the extent that the faculty and teachers a the schools they attend should actively collude with them from preventing their parents or legal guardians from knowing about that transition.
On July 20, 2023, Sonja Shaw, Jon Monroe, James Na, and Andrew Cruz prevailed on a 4-to-1 vote in which Board member Don Bridge dissented adopting 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.
The board had widely heralded its intent to take that action, which resulted in California Attorney General Rob Bonta posting a letter to the district in which he warned that he would use his authority as the state’s highest ranking law enforcement officer to prevent any such policy from being effectuated. In addition, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond sojourned from Sacramento to Chino to attend the July 20, 2023 meeting at which he addressed the school board in an effort to dissuade it from proceeding with the policy. Also heard by the board that night were transsexual advocates from near and distant spots throughout California who went on record as being in opposition to the board’s intended action, along with substantial numbers of parents and parental rights advocates encouraging the board members to proceed.
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.
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.
At every turn, the four members of the Chino Valley Unified School District had been outmaneuvered. They continued to fight.
Almost as soon as Governor Newsom’s signature was dry on the Assembly Bill 1855, 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, allies the four members of the Chino Valley Unified School District did not know they had, were engaged in a battle very similar to their own, not in state court but at the federal level. On April 27, 1983 attorneys with the Thomas More Society and the law firm of LiMandri & Jonna had filed suit on behalf of Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, middle school teachers in the Escondido Union School District against Mark Olson, the chairman of the school board with the Escondido Union School District and the district itself.
In the Mirabelli vs. Olson matter, latter joined by a group of parents who were not identified by name, the two teachers took issue with 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 case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California against the Escondido Union School District Board of Education and the school district, and came to include as defendants the California State Board of Education, the California Department of Education and State Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond over
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.
Thouth it had been thirty months in the coming, the controlling right-wing faction on the Chino Valley Unified School District found itself vindicated by an entity of no less authority than the U.S. Supreme Court. Those board members . and board members with nearly a dozen school districts around the state which had followed in the footsteps of the Chnio Valley Unified School District and 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 were heartened by Judge Benitez’s ruling.
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, West and the parents who had joined in the suit 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 on March 2 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 the rights of parents to be informed about what is happening with their children overcome 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.
On March 30, in response to a filing by the Thomas More Society, which is a conservative Roman Catholic public interest law firm based in Chicago, and LiMandri & Jonna, LLP, which is based in Southern California, Judge Benitez in an 9-page respons ordered the State of California to pay the lawyers who had worked on the Mirabelli v. Olson case $4.52 million in legal costs.
Judge Benitez granted the entirety of the fee petition, noting Bonta and other lawyers for the state had pursued a “litigation strategy of resisting at all junctures” even when the law and facts were strongly stacked against the Escondido District and the state. Benitez made particular note of state repeatedly filing motions to dismiss the even in the face of similar or virtually identical motions having been denied, making knee-jerk responses without fully assimilating the ongoing progress of the case and filing motions that were relating to issues or principles in law that were already the subject of motions that had not yet been ruled upon. Benitez referenced two arguments posed by state which were in his words “meritlesss,” and which he implied the state new to be without merit before they were filed.
Bonta and his stable of attorneys had simply been outlawyered by the Thomas More Society and LiMandri & Jonna, Benitez opined, based upon the way in which Mirabelli & West’s legal team adroitly and cogently amended its complaint on multiple occasions when the state marshaled differing legal defenses.
“California has now lost at the district court, lost at the Supreme Court, and been turned away by the Ninth Circuit,” said Peter Breen, Thomas More Society Executive Vice President and the society’s head of litigation. “The state has repeatedly tried to paint parents who don’t immediately accept their children’s assertion of a new name and gender as ‘abusive.’ The courts have resoundingly rejected that premise.”
Breen added that Judge Benitez’s “$4.5 million fee award sends an unmistakable message to state governments and school districts. If you trample the constitutional rights of parents, you will pay for it.”
Breen said Bonta and the California Attorney General’s Office had done their level best to posit a defense of a flawed policy “and now Californians will foot the bill.”
Circumstances suggest the Chino Valley Unified School District is now just a court motion away from recovering its legal costs in propounding and pursing the principle of parental notification.
-Mark Gutglueck