(Washington, D.C.)—The government cannot constitutionally require public schools to facilitate a student’s social transition while intentionally withholding that information from their parents, and the Liberty Justice Center is proud to stand with the brave parents and teachers in Mirabelli v. Bonta as they fight against the violation of their fundamental parental rights and religious liberties. On the forefront in the battle to defend parental rights in the education space, especially in California, LJC supports Advancing American Freedom in their amicus brief in Mirabelli v. Bonta.
The case arises from a California public school’s “social transition” and privacy policy that requires school staff to utilize students’ preferred names and pronouns at school while simultaneously withholding that same information from parents. Two Christian middle-school teachers, Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, sued after the Escondido Union School District (EUSD) allegedly refused to grant religious exemptions from these requirements. Since its original filing, this lawsuit has broadened into a class action including parents who were unaware for an extended period that their children were being treated as a different gender at school, some learning of it only after severe mental-health crises, including a suicide attempt by one of the students.
The Liberty Justice Center is part of a multi-year legal effort to uphold parental notice and transparency in California schools. In California v. Chino Valley Unified School District, LJC secured a win for parental notification, defending the school district’s updated policy requiring administrators to notify parents if their child requests changes to their official or unofficial records. Currently, LJC is challenging California’s AB 1955 in Chino Valley Unified School District v. Newsom, which bans parental-notification policies and reinforces secrecy from parents. In California Department of Education v. Rocklin Unified School District, LJC is defending the district’s parental-notification policy against the California Department of Education.
Withholding or obscuring information from parents about significant developments affecting a child’s wellbeing and the parent-child relationship is detrimental to the children involved. LJC has submitted multiple amicus briefs on the issue on behalf of Dr. Erica E. Anderson, a transgender clinical psychologist with more than 45 years of experience counseling children and adolescents on gender-identity-related issues including Littlejohn v. School Board of Leon County, Heaps v. Delaware Valley Regional High School Board of Education, and Regino v. Staley.
“California’s policy regime treats parents not as partners, but as problems. Teachers and counselors are instructed to affirm a child’s new identity at school while withholding that same information at home,” says Rob Cowburn, Senior Counsel for Education Freedom at the Liberty Justice Center. “Parents are presumed dangerous or untrustworthy by default. The burden of proof is flipped: instead of the state justifying secrecy, parents must somehow earn transparency.”
The amicus brief in Mirabelli v. Bonta calls on the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the Ninth Circuit’s stay and reinstate a district court injunction against this policy, arguing that the right to direct a child’s upbringing is not exclusive to religious exemptions but belongs to all parents. The Liberty Justice Center’s agrees with this stance and continues to engage in its own efforts to maintain that children do not belong to the government, and it is in each child’s best interest that their parents remain involved in their education and that their parental rights do not end while children are outside their physical home to attend school.
The Liberty Justice Center’s extensive work defending parental rights and advancing education freedom can be explored here.