School Districts Are Keeping Parents in the Dark over Social Transitioning

Recently, my colleague at Alliance Defending Freedom, Senior Counsel Matt Sharp, and a former ADF client, teacher Deb Figliola, testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. Lawmakers were reviewing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) with an eye toward updating them to face a growing, disturbing trend in public schools — school districts across the country engaged in social transitioning of students without informing parents and often against the expressed wishes of parents.

So-called social transition, including going by a name and pronouns that do not match a person’s sex, is a major intervention in a child’s life that can place the child on a difficult-to-escape pathway to medicalized transition, carrying the risk of life-altering damage. Yet over 1,000 school districts — attended by over 12 million students — have secret-transition policies that direct school officials to hide information about children from parents.

These policies often violate both FERPA and PPRA, built on the principle that parents have a fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education. They treat parents as obstacles at best, and at worst as adversaries, and infringe on the free-exercise rights of teachers. The School Board of the City of Harrisonburg, Va., implemented one such policy, prompting ADF to file a successful lawsuit on behalf of Figliola and two other teachers.

Safeguarding student privacy and parental rights should be a nonpartisan issue. However, Democratic members of the committee took the opportunity to lambast the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Apparently, these members have concluded that the biggest problem in American education is that we do not have enough bureaucrats. They did not stop there.

Despite Sharp’s testimony of numerous parents who asked ADF to sue their school districts to stop the schools from interfering with their God-given rights to direct the upbringing of their children, and despite Figliola’s firsthand account of her school district mandating that she as a teacher keep parents in the dark about what was going on with their children at school, Democrats accused Republicans of pushing a “false narrative.” For those who do not speak “politician,” that was a thinly veiled attack on the witnesses as liars. Adding to the irony of the “false narrative” charge was the fact that the hearing took place the day after oral argument at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Vitsaxaki v. Skaneateles Central School District, yet another secret-social-transition case.

Federal laws, including FERPA and PPRA, are a good starting point to help stop this travesty, but Americans should not have to wait for a federal agency to launch an investigation into schools that violate these fundamental freedoms for parents and put kids in harm’s way. A private cause of action for parents should be added to both FERPA and PPRA, clarifying that parents can bring suit against school districts for violating parental rights. Parents have a right to know what is happening to their children. School districts should partner with parents to educate their children, but far too many treat parents as obstinate rubes who stand in the way of the real professionals who know best.

Consider the absurd paradox that schools must get parental consent to administer aspirin, take students on a field trip, and allow them to participate in extracurricular activities, yet parents are kept in the dark on social transitioning, which can deeply affect their children’s health and well-being. So-called social transition, including going by a name and pronouns that do not match a person’s sex, is a major intervention in a child’s life that can place the child on a difficult-to-escape pathway to medicalized transition, carrying the risk of life-altering damage. No school district should override parents’ role by making important mental health decisions for children — especially not while concealing such decisions from parents. Policies like these drive a wedge between kids and their parents at a time when struggling children are most in need of guidance from those who know them and love them best: their parents.

As President Ronald Reagan said: “. . . There's nothing more important to all of us and nothing more important to our society and our nation and our future than the family. The family is where our children learn a moral view; it's where the values of personal responsibility and loyalty and kindness are taught. And it's not saying too much to say as the family goes, so goes the nation.”

The home is, was, and should always be the real department of education. Regardless of whether the U.S. Department of Education is going to continue to exist, FERPA and PPRA must be updated to reflect the current educational landscape, which is plagued by dangerous ideologies that did not exist when these statutes were enacted.