A hastily passed state law scheduled to go into effect next year would prohibit teachers and school administrators from telling parents when their children are experiencing gender dysphoria. But the law, observers say, is patently unconstitutional and goes against all other pertinent federal and state laws. It may be used temporarily by local school districts to bulldoze parental rights — unless parents are vigilant at the local school level, they say.
“AB 1955 aims to prohibit schools from adopting parental notification policies that require school administrators to inform parents if their children ask to be referred to by a name or pronouns that differ from their gender at birth, or to access sex-segregated school programs or bathrooms for the opposite gender,” states the Liberty Justice Center which is seeking a federal injunction against the law before it goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2025. “AB 1955 would also overturn existing parental notification policies and strengthen policies that require school employees to keep secrets from parents.”
AB 1955 is “a fear-mongering bill” designed to intimidate school districts and teachers into complying with the wishes of the legislature before the law is overturned.
— Lance Christensen, California Policy Institute
AB 1955 directly violates Education Code section 51101, which explicitly affirms parents’ rights over their children and the legal obligation of schools to give parents full access to information concerning their children.
“Supreme Court precedents for more than 100 years have said that parents have the absolute right for the care and upbringing of their children,” says Lance Christensen of the California Policy Institute, who helped organize a parental rights rally last fall in Simi Valley. “Parents don’t give up those rights as soon as their kids go to school. They don’t give those rights up because they drop their kids off for eight hours a day. [But] the California legislature feels like they can ignore that constitutional precedent. They think it’s alright for a school administrator to basically override a parent.”
“There are current laws already on the books that allow educators and teachers and schools to notify parents about everything, and they supersede AB 1955.”
Amy Bohn, PER
Superintendent Mark McLaughlin and CVUSD board members have aggressively enforced “secrecy” policies, forcing teachers and staff to hide critical information about students, including so-called “transitions” from one gender to another. After the Conejo Guardian reported in 2023 that CVUSD leaders were secretly allowing a 6th-grade girl at a middle school in Newbury Park to sleep in a boys’ cabin at Outdoor School, the district responded by pursuing legal action against teachers, staff and the Guardian.
Numerous sources have told the Guardian that McLaughlin and the CVUSD board forced teachers to undergo questioning by a principal, the union president and the head of human resources for violating the child’s “right” to keep this information from her parents. The district, these sources say, demanded that teachers and staff sign a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) so parents don’t discover information about their own children that the district wants to keep secret.
“Every court case we’ve had, we’ve won, and we will continue to win because the law is on our side.”
— Christensen
But backlash over secrecy policies has grown statewide, and the new law is so radical that Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it last year after seeing lopsided polling against it, Christensen says. It was resurrected this spring and rushed through by the governor and legislature in response to, among other things, school districts adopting anti-secrecy parental notification policies.
“It is a political statement and a reactionary law,” says Amy Bohn, co-founder and president of Protection of the Educational Rights of Kids (PERK), whose three children attended Conejo Valley public and private schools, including Thousand Oaks High School.
Bohn says leaders in Sacramento felt threatened by the widespread backlash against school secrecy policies and by the nearly-successful Protect Kids ballot initiative, which would have safeguarded parental notification at schools, protected girls’ sports and banned sterilization and gender surgeries for minors.
“Every single family should be outraged that this law passed because it undermines every fabric of the parent-child relationship and sets the school up to create secret files from parents,” she says.
The undermining of parents is already taking place. Last year, a parent contacted PERK to say he had called his child’s school only to be told his daughter did not exist. The reason: the school had worked with her to change her name to a boy’s name and had created new, secret files. The parent was summoned to meet with a counselor, and when he expressed opposition to what the school was doing, Child Protective Services was called.
“This really happened,” Bohn says. “California is constantly trying to remove parental rights. They are doing this already in schools. AB 1955 is just their attempt to codify or solidify it into law.”
As alarming as AB 1955 is, every court case concerning parental rights has gone against the State’s anti-parent agenda. In several recent examples:
— Jessica Tapia, a physical education teacher at Jurupa Valley High School in Riverside County, refused to obey her school district’s demands that she lie to parents about their children’s gender identity, refer to students by their preferred pronouns, stop expressing her religious beliefs with students or on her social media, and allow students to use the bathroom or locker room that matched their preferred sex. Tapia was fired, sued the district and won a judgment of $360,000 earlier this year.
— In 2023, Jessica Konen, a mother in Monterey County, discovered that her daughter, Alicia, had “transitioned” at school with the school’s help and had been told by school administrators that she may not know who she “truly was inside.” Jessica sued and won a $100,000 award from the Spreckels Union School District.
— In September 2023, a California federal court based in San Diego granted teachers Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West a reprieve from the Escondido Union School District’s policy forcing them to lie to parents about children’s gender identity.
For these reasons, the California legislature did not even address federal laws about parental rights, which clearly give parents the right to have all information provided to them, “which a lot of school districts are not doing and should suffer consequences of having federal funding withheld from them,” says Christensen.
He calls AB 1955 “a fear-mongering bill” designed to intimidate school districts and teachers into complying with the wishes of the legislature before the law is overturned. The State has already pressured and threatened California school districts that adopted parental notification policies. In Chino Hills, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond “went crazy and showed up to the school board meeting and tried to usurp the meeting,” says Christensen. The attorney general is aggressively suing school districts as well but recently admitted under oath that the State has no basis for demanding that schools practice secrecy, says Bohn.
The State’s only basis for its anti-parental-rights crusade is “guidance” given by the California Department of Education (DOE) in 2013. This guidance has no foundation in any statute or law but is simply part of a “fact sheet” the department created. (Search “California Department of Education FAQ AB 1266” to see the fact sheet.)
In it, the DOE opined that if a child is suffering from gender dysphoria, the school has the right and obligation to create false records and withhold that information from parents — going directly against Education Code 51101 and all pertinent laws.
Given this nonexistent legal foundation, parental rights advocates say schools should have every confidence in ignoring AB 1955’s demands.
“There are current laws already on the books that allow educators and teachers and schools to notify parents about everything, and they supersede AB 1955,” says Bohn. “We are sending notifications to all superintendents and school districts that they do not have to enforce AB 1955 because there are broader parental notification policies in place. We are teaching educators and superintendents that they have the law to back them up to notify parents, and not to be threatened, intimated or bullied by this other law, because everything else is greater than that.”
Still, parents in every public school district should immediately get involved to keep principals, boards and teachers from complying with AB 1955, advocates say.
“Parents should demand that all school boards have a policy,” Christensen says. “They should go to the next school board meeting or write a letter to their board members and say, ‘We would like to know the school district’s plan for a policy in addressing this issue. Are you going to protect the teachers who decide to tell parents the truth?’ Parents need to ask not just their school board members but their principals and their teachers. They need to be very direct and say, ‘We just want to hear from you. What are you going to do if a child comes to you and tells you this?’”
Bohn says that AB 1955 is about “removing the consent of parents” and that parents must not be complacent.
“I encourage them to know the law because the law, the tools, everything is on their side,” she says. “Don’t give in to the intimidation and the lie that they cannot be notified anymore. It’s not true. Know the law. Know your rights.”
Christensen urges parents to form and strengthen local parents’ groups.
“Parents need to be organized and consistent. It can’t be a one-and-done,” he says. “They have to be vigilant on this.”
He suggests joining with Moms for Liberty, which won an injunction from a federal judge on Title IX gender redefinitions.
“They are really ramping up their resources and efforts to litigate and push hard on these issues,” he says.
As the fight continues, parents should have every reason for hope — as long as they engage with their local schools.
“All of the court cases are coming our direction,” Christensen says. “Every court case we’ve had, we’ve won, and we will continue to win because the law is on our side.”
