‘Dead on Arrival’: California Parental Notification Ban Draws Instant Legal Challenges

Cue the lawsuits. The moment California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) signed his name to a ban (AB 1955) on school parental notification policies, he painted a big, red target on its back (a metaphorical, legal target, not a literal one). The very next day, Liberty Justice Center (LJC) filed a lawsuit on behalf of Chino Valley USD. Chino Valley USD school board president Sonja Shaw called the bill “an egregious attack on parents’ God-given and constitutional rights.”

“School officials do not have the right to keep secrets from parents, but parents do have a constitutional right to know what their minor children are doing at school,” declared LJC senior counsel Emily Rae. “Parents are the legal guardians of their children, not Governor Newsom, Attorney General [Rob] Bonta, or Superintendent [Tony] Thurmond.”

“PK-12 minor students, most of whom are too young to drive, vote, or provide medical consent for themselves, are also too young to make life-altering decisions about their expressed gender identity without their parents’ knowledge,” continued Rae. “But that is precisely what AB 1955 enables — with potentially devastating consequences for children too young to fully comprehend them.”

“This legislation weaponizes the system against those who know and care for their children the most,” Shaw declared, in a statement obtained by The Washington Stand. “It is morally corrupt and was enacted to prevent parents from exercising their rights — and to avoid being outsmarted by a school district and parents who challenged them. It’s always been about their ego.”

“AB 1955 is dead on arrival,” agreed Paul Jonna, special counsel at the Thomas More Society (TMS). As a federal court in California recently decided in Mirabelli v. Olson, he said, “parents have federal constitutional rights to know about their own children’s gender transitions. Schools can’t force teachers to withhold that information from parents, and school districts absolutely have the right to pass parental notification policies.”

TMS represents two teachers in the Escondido Unified School District (USD), where pro-LGBT activists on the school board already passed a district-level policy preventing teachers, counselors, and other staff from informing parents about their child’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. The deception runs so deeply that staff will call a child by one name at school and in school records but keep that name out of the student’s official record to hide it from their parents. Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West challenged the policy, arguing that such blatant lying to parents violated their Christian religious beliefs.

In September 2023, U.S. Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California issued a preliminary injunction against Escondido USD, finding that “parental involvement is essential to the healthy maturation of schoolchildren.” Benitez identified “a trifecta of harm” created by a policy against informing parents about their child’s behavior at school:

“It harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. It harms the parents by depriving them of the long-recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children. And finally, it harms [teachers] who are compelled to violate the parent’s rights by forcing plaintiffs to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students — violating plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.”

Benitez rejected the school district’s “mistaken” argument that “the District bears a duty to place a child’s right to privacy above, and in derogation of, the rights of a child’s parents.”

California appears to make a similar argument for their statewide parental notification ban. “California legislators justify this blatantly unconstitutional law by citing ‘state privacy rights’ — but they apparently do not understand, or refuse to recognize, that those rights are superseded by federal constitutional rights,” said Jonna.

TMS filed an amended class action complaint on behalf of teachers with conscientious objections to lying to parents. If the federal court rules in their favor, as appears likely from the preliminary injunction, it “will necessarily include enjoining AB 1955.” This action was argued before the judge on July 10, meaning that a lawsuit that could spell the end of AB 1955 was well on its way even before the California legislature enacted the measure.

There’s a certain poetic justice to progressive states facing constitutional legal challenges to their family dissolution schemes when that’s the very same tactic they use to throw sand in the gears of pro-life, pro-family states.

“Every parent is now aware of this betrayal and will rise to challenge it,” Shaw declared. “We will continue to fight relentlessly to protect our children and ensure that our rights are upheld. This battle is far from over, and we will not rest until justice is served and parental rights are fully restored.”