Laura Powell@LauraPowellEsq
The California Department of Education has not released any statement on Monday’s opinion from the US Supreme Court in Mirabelli v. Bonta, but it did finally add the notice mandated by the district court in December on their page entitled “Protections for LGBTQ+ Students: AB 1955,” which says, “Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence.”
And yet, the CDE has failed to revise the rest of the content on that page, so that it continues to assert that sharing such information with parents is a violation of the children’s constitutional rights. Although this case did not directly address the constitutionality of that particular state law, the Supreme Court expressly rejected the argument that a child has a privacy interest in this situation that trumps the parents’ constitutional rights.
It appears that the CDE may intend to defy the courts and continue to encourage schools to violate parental rights.
