The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing the public school district of Kansas City, Kans. (KCKPS) for guidelines that would facilitate student gender transitions without notifying parents, the DOJ announced Tuesday. This is the first instance of the U.S. government suing a local school district for violating the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) for such a policy.

“The District maintains policies that direct staff to help students socially transition to a different gender at school and to withhold this information from parents as confidential,” the complaint alleges. “This conduct violates FERPA’s guarantee that parents can see their children’s school records, seek correction of those records, and prevent disclosure of identifying information without consent. This conduct also violates PPRA’s guarantee that minor students will not be required to submit to any survey, analysis, or evaluation revealing sensitive information without prior written consent from their parents.”

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R) revealed the transgender secrecy policy in February 2024, when he identified KCKPS as one of six Kansas school districts to maintain such a policy. Under pressure from his office, two districts immediately changed their policies, while the other four “dug in their heels and essentially asserted that school administrators know better than parents,” his office said. “Some schools denied that their policies cut parents out of the picture, but the Attorney General’s letters quote the offending language directly from those schools’ policies.”

The U.S. Department of Education initiated a FERPA investigation into KCKPS in August 2025. The next month, KCKPS responded to the Department of Education as it had to the state attorney general, claiming that “its Gender Policy was irrelevant because the board of education ‘never adopted, approved, or utilized’ the Gender Policy as a formal policy,” the lawsuit summarized. In August 2026, the Department of Education notified the DOJ of its determination that KCKPS is in violation of both FERPA and the PPRA, and the DOJ filed a lawsuit on September 1.

“Contrary to the allegations in the Complaint, the district maintains that it is in full compliance with FERPA and PPRA and is disappointed by the DOJ’s decision to file the lawsuit,” a school district spokesperson responded.

The school district appears to claim compliance by arguing that its transgender guidance is unofficial. At an open public meeting in 2017, the school board received “Guidelines for Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students at School” as part of a presentation, and it “accepted the report as an information item.” The school board “never formally voted to adopt the Guidance Document,” according to the lawsuit.

However, “the District nonetheless implemented a substantially similar policy titled USD 500 Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students Internal Guidance Document,” the lawsuit continued, and that document has passed through at least two iterations.

In a July 31 interview, KCKPS superintendent Dr. Anna Stubblefield protested that the guidance document “is not policy, it is guidance. And there’s nowhere in the guidance where we say ‘withhold information from parents.’ We have no reason or incentive to withhold information from parents about anything that they’re entitled to for their students.”

However, the lawsuit provided evidence that school officials make reference to the document, even though it has never been publicly adopted. “In an undated recording, Canise Salinas, Assistant Superintendent of Organizational Development, referred to a ‘transgender guideline,’ which she claimed is not made available to the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools community but is instead safeguarded by certain ‘gatekeepers,’” it stated. Additionally, “In an undated recording, Lauren Hernandez, Organizational Development Specialist, discussed how to ‘support[] students whose culture is against the LGBTQIA relationships,’ including asking a student about his willingness to share information with his father who is a preacher.”

The lawsuit cited “the current version of the Transgender Guideline”:

“If any staff member learns a student is transgender or gender non-conforming, that information should be relayed to the school principal without delay. The school principal should discuss available accommodations and resources with the student or the student’s parent or legal guardian, including the availability of a planning meeting. If it becomes known that the student does not want the student’s parent or legal guardian included at this stage, that request will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. … When reviewing the request, the district will consider the student’s age, the student’s grade level, the student’s welfare based on the information available to the district at that time, and any other relevant information” (emphasis added).

According to the lawsuit, this guidance violates FERPA by allowing for situations where parents would not be given complete information about their child’s education. If a student asked the school not to inform his or her parents, and if the school decided to grant that request after a review, then the school would be in violation of FERPA.

“As a condition of federal funding, FERPA requires school districts to give parents the right to have access to their children’s education records, the right to seek to have the records amended, and the right to have some control over the disclosure of personally identifiable information from the education records,” the lawsuit stated. “FERPA prohibits school districts from maintaining a policy that denies or effectively prevents a parent of a minor student from exercising the right to inspect and review the student’s education records.”

The lawsuit further alleges that the evaluation process could violate the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA). According to the PPRA, “a school district must not require a minor student to submit to any survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning Protected Categories without prior written parental consent.” However, “The process outlined in the Transgender Guideline, which requires District employees to ‘evaluate’ a student’s request to exclude the student’s parents, necessarily includes District employees administering surveys, analyses, or evaluations to minor students that reveal sensitive information in the Protected Categories that can be used to review and evaluate a student’s request to exclude the student’s parents and create a Gender Plan.”

Because of the discrepancies between the school district’s transgender guidance and federal law, “this lawsuit should not come as a surprise,” said Ryan A. Kriegshauser, U.S. Attorney for the District of Kansas. “Public education functions effectively only when schools and parents engage in a genuine partnership. When schools withhold information from parents, they undermine trust and disrupt the essential balance between families and public educators.”

According to a 2023 report by Parents Defending Education, more than 1,000 school districts across the country encourage school officials to hide students’ gender identity from parents. This has resulted in lawsuits by parents (and teachers), from Maryland to Massachusetts to California. But a federal civil rights lawsuit is a new development.

“Parental rights are paramount in the operation of America’s public schools, and Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools does not know children better than their own parents,” declared Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Department will not tolerate school districts playing fast and loose with federal law in the service of radical gender ideology.”