On June 2, 2026, Liberty Justice Center’s new Parental Action and Rights Enforcement to ensure Notice, Transparency and Safety initiative (PARENTS) sent a letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta demanding he advise approximately 600 school districts to comply with the Supreme Court and Constitution concerning parental notification policies.
An initiative designed to support parents’ right to direct their own children’s education from coast to coast, PARENTS has drawn a line in the sand for school bureaucrats across the country.
In 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1955 (AB 1955) into law. AB 1955 instructs school districts to keep information regarding children’s efforts to “gender transition” at school secret from their own parents.
In other words, if your son or daughter starts going by a different name, wearing clothes that don’t match their sex or using the bathroom with the opposite sex, “mum’s the word.”
If you find the idea disturbing, it means only that you are still sane.
Lucky for us, the U.S. Supreme Court recently stepped in to clear up California bureaucrats’ confusion concerning their ability to impose gender ideology on our children.
Mirabelli v. Bonta concerned two sets of parents who objected to a California school policy keeping them in the dark when their daughter began to present as a boy and use a male name and male pronouns during her seventh-grade year.
When the parents found out about it, they instructed the school to not use the male name or male pronouns, for the sake of her own mental health.
Unfortunately, the school ignored their wishes, citing AB 1955.
During litigation, the parents claimed that these policies violated their rights under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court said they were right.
In ruling in their favor, the court made clear that under long-established precedent, parents—not the state—have primary authority with respect to the upbringing and education of children.
Policies that substantially interfere with the right of parents to guide the religious development of their children are presumed to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
Additionally, non-religious parents also have the right, under the Fourteenth Amendment, not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.
But that’s not the only federal law these secret gender transition policies violate.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) governs communication between schools and the parents of a student regarding that student’s education and education records.
FERPA defines “education records” as documents that “contain information directly related to a student” and “are maintained by an educational agency or institution.”
Schools that receive federal funds must guarantee parental access to student education records and the ability to contest and correct errors within those records.
Like the constitutional provisions at issue in Mirabelli, AB 1955 is at direct odds with FERPA.
Any record created by a school pertaining to a child’s gender transition is obviously a record that “contains information directly related to a student” and is “maintained by an educational agency.” As such, those records must be accessible to parents.
This information is especially important given the context.
Numerous studies assert that transgender-identifying and gender nonconforming students suffer from increased psychological, emotional and physical harassment and abuse, and that transgender-identifying youth experience an abnormally high number of suicidal thoughts and make an abnormally high number of suicide attempts.
As the court made clear in Mirabelli, supposed conflict with California law is not a valid excuse for continuing policies that conflict with parents’ federal rights.
FERPA, the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and all federal laws preempt state law when it is impossible to comply with both federal and state law, or when state law stands as an obstacle to the accomplishment of federal objectives.
This means that when state and federal law conflict, federal law wins out.
AB 1955, which purports to bar schools from adopting parental notification policies without a child’s consent, is in direct conflict with the federal constitutional and statutory rights described above.
Gender dysphoria is a condition that has an important bearing on a child’s mental health, and policies concealing that information from parents likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.
Such policies not only risk harming at-risk children, but to the degree they interfere with parents’ federal rights, also open those districts to federal complaints, investigations by the United States Department of Education, and civil lawsuits.
That’s why Liberty Justice Center’s PARENTS initiative is putting Attorney General Bonta and California on notice: Stop violating parents’ rights, or we will see you in court.
Tim Snowball is Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, public-interest litigation law firm.