SHHHHHH! DON'T TELL THE PARENTS

By Jennifer Kennedy, Esq.

California Democrats just passed AB1955 out of committee: a law to make it legal for schools to lie to parents. It's the proposed law that the State has been pretending was a law for 11 years: the one that it told schools required them to lie to parents about a child's new public "gender identity" at school, unless the child gave permission to the school to tell his mom and dad. That was a lie. There is no such law.

But that's what the California Department of Education told schools. The California School Board Association distributed parent secrecy policies to school boards that almost all adopted them without question; even conservative school boards.  School boards and teachers were then trained by attorneys on how to circumvent the parents.  The attorneys misstated the law, creating a privacy right that does not exist. Below you can see that the lawyers recommend creation of a shadow file in an illegal attempt to skirt Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”), the law that grants to parents, not the students, the rights to see and alter their minor student’s education records.

(This is from the power point that was presented to Roseville Unified School District that keeps secrets from parents, and secretly socially transitioned students.)

The schools then made policies that threatened teachers with being fired if they didn't pledge to lie to parents about gender, and lie to children that they can change sex --by forcing them to ask for pronouns, use pronouns chosen by the child, and agree that a child could be born in the wrong body. That's what the State made schools believe since 2013, since AB1266 passed -  the bill that permitted boys in girls' bathrooms and on girls' sports teams - the bill that said there is no difference between males and females.

But parents found out about the secrecy policies. Parents’ concerns were dismissed by the schools and were told that they had no right to know, but then they crossed the wrong parents and teachers. Jessica Konen sued Spreckels Union for the secret transitioning of her 5th grade daughter to a male identity, by two activist teachers who created a gender club and then trolled through kids' social media looking for little disciples, including Jessica's daughter.  Aurora Regino sued Chico Unified for the secret transitioning of her 5th grade, 11-year-old daughter to a male identity, by an activist counselor who invited Aurora's daughter to a lunch "arts and crafts club" where the counselor talked about gender identity and encouraged the girls to explore it.  Chico Unified instructed Aurora’s daughter to lie to her mother, as well as teaching her about chest compression binders. Teacher Jessica Tapia sued Jurupa Valley Unified for refusing to lie to children and parents about gender. Two teachers sued Escondido Unified for its parent-secrecy policy.

We fought back legislatively. My colleague Erin Friday, Esq. wrote AB1314, the bill to require schools to notify parents if a child asks for a new name, new pronouns, to change records, or to use the opposite-sex bathrooms. A group of attorneys along with me finessed it. Asm. Bill Essayli (R) was the only legislator--of any party--who would touch it.  But the California supermajority refused to even give it a single hearing. Asm. Al Muratsuchi (D) refused to let it be heard in its initial assigned hearing in the Assembly Education Committee because even debating whether parents have a right to know when their child is experiencing acute distress with their natural body is transphobic, per Muratsuchi.

We fought back by taking it to the school boards. We refined AB1314 into a "Parent Notification Policy" that each school district could enact. School districts have the power to create their own policies.  A handful of school districts enacted these policies that recognize the dangers posed to children by the transgender ideology, and recognize that parents need honest communication from schools if a child begins publicly demonstrating classic signs of gender dysphoria, such as adopting a new name, using new pronouns, and acting like the opposite sex to the degree that the child wants to use the opposite-sex bathrooms.  Chino Valley Unified School District under the steadfast leadership of Sonja Shaw bravely went first. Murrieta, Temecula, Orange, and Rocklin all enacted strong parental notification policies. Other districts enacted less powerful parental notifications policies in response to Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit against Chino Valley Unified, which was his whole goal. Rob Bonta’s lawsuit had a chilling effect which stopped other district from enacting parental notification policies.

Appeasement does not work in this environment. School districts must decide if they want to be sued by parents and teachers or by the State; either way they will be sued.  To date, seven lawsuits have been filed against school districts on the issue of whether the State can force teachers and schools to deceive parents about their student’s mental health issue – gender dysphoria.

We once again pivoted and took the fight to the people. Jonathan Zachreson and Scott Davison [of Reopen Schools], Jay Reed, Nicole Pearson and Erin Friday created the Protect Kids California initiative. The consolidated initiative would (1) protect girls' sports and spaces (repeal AB1266); (2) stop the parent-secrecy policies in schools; and (3) end the medical "gender interventions" of drugs and surgeries on minor children in California.  The small leadership team sparked a grassroots army comprising Democrats, Independents and Republicans working in tandem to gather signatures to get the Protect Kids California Act onto the ballot.

This made the Democrat Supermajority panic.

Then we started winning the lawsuits. Spreckels Union School District had already paid $100,000 to settle Jessica Konen's case. The judge in the Escondido case denounced the parent-secrecy policy as creating a "trifecta of harm" to the students, parents, and teachers, and ordered the teachers reinstated to their classrooms. In the Chino Valley case, the portion that required notification of parents when a child sought to change his or her official records survived the preliminary legal challenge. Mainstream media refused to report that all important fact. Jessica Tapia was just awarded a $360,000 settlement after being fired by Jurupa Valley Unified for refusing to lie to children and parents about gender. Aurora Regino's case was heard on appeal in the Ninth Circuit. Having sat in on the oral arguments, I predict its dismissal will be reversed, and that the school district will soon be offering a settlement to Aurora rather than having another federal court rule against school deception policies.

Meanwhile the Protect Kids California initiative drive began picking up steam, with social media flooded with images of citizens up and down the state gathering signatures in every possible location, weekend after weekend of tables full of volunteers and eager signers. Polling showed that 75% of Californians agree with everything in the initiative, and if it were on the ballot, it would win.

Add then the coup de grâce:  The State of California admitted in court, no less than four times, that we had been right all along: the Department of Education’s guidance was not law, that schools did not need to deceive parents, and that the State would not punish schools for not enforcing the guidance.

They admitted it four times, in two different hearings.  This strategic admission was to get Bonta and Newsom dismissed from the Escondido case as defendants. 

Below are some excerpts from the hearing in the Escondido case. Bonta’s attorney starts.

This is the Judge trying to get the State to take a position, is it’s position that secret policies are law or not?

What the judge and the teachers’ attorney was getting at in the above-dialogue was that the State cannot have it both ways.  It cannot claim that the school secrecy policy promoted by the Department of Education is not mandatory to avoid litigation against state actors, but at the same time, require that schools keep secrets from parents. In simple vernacular, the State needs to pick a lane.

The State’s attorney ploy worked; Newsom and Bonta were dismissed. However, I listened to full hearing and predict Bonta will be added back as a defendant very shortly and the Judge will be hopping mad, because after all, Bonta’s lawyer promised the court that the Attorney General would not force secrecy, and now Bonta is the very first supporter listed in the school secrets act’s analysis. 

Does the law require schools to lie to parents?

There is no law on which all schools statewide had based their parent-secrecy policies, no law for their policies threatening teachers with termination if they did not promise to lie to parents, and no law requiring schools to lie to parents about their children’s distress. In fact, teachers can be terminated for not being honest, under Education Code section 44932.

Finding no California law that grants a privacy right between parent and a gender dysphoric child, the LGBTQ caucus and its main lobbyist – Equality California -  wrote one because after all who better to parent a child than the State.  In the waning months of the legislative session, long after the deadline to have actually introduced a bill in the constitutional way--you know, with advance notice to the people--the LBGTQ caucus pulled the sneaky trick they do at least once per session: the "gut and amend" maneuver. The LGBTQ caucus took Assembly Bill 1955, a somewhat innocuous bill that sailed through the Assembly without a peep, and ripped out its content and changed its title. The new school secrets bill is ironically called the "SAFETY Act," and by its terms would prohibit any school district from enacting a policy "requiring the disclosure of a student's gender identity, sexual orientation, or gender expression." Of course, that language bears no resemblance to either the very narrow language or the intent of the Parent Notification Policies passed by Chino and the other school districts.  It employed the decades old trick of connecting the “L”, “G” and “B” to gender dysphoria so that it can call opposers homophobic.  Everything must be couched in vague and ambiguous terms of sexuality-based and "gender"-based victimhood, whether it’s true or not.

The bill will also protect school employees who deceive parents and push gender ideology on students, by prohibiting disciplinary actions against these groomer teachers.

AB1955 that was heard on May 29, 2024 for its first and now only genuine hearing in the Senate Education Committee. (Remember those guys? Yes, the education committee is the same committee that refused to hear AB1314 because, as Asm. Al Muratsuchi said holding a public hearing on whether schools should lie to parents, and holding a public hearing would expose the LGBTQ community to "hate speech."  Parents who want to know if their children are suffering are HATERS. (The full hearing is here.) 

Two hours of debate ensued, marked with flat-out falsehoods by the proponents and the predictable conflation and beating of drums about how "LGBTQ youth" are bullied, harassed, victimized, thrown onto the street by parents, forced to fail out of school and not thrive academically, and ultimately commit suicide. We, of course, saw and heard the Clown World transformation of wrong to right:

Teachers who lie to parents are "creating a safe space for children whose parents are unsupportive," they told us.  They are judge, jury and executioner, and the parents won’t even know that they have been accused of potentially be unsafe, abusive and uncaring.

Even though a trans-identifying child is publicly identifying on campus with a new identity, and even though "gender best practices" require that the school alert everyone so as to not misgender the child, that publicly "out" child must never be "outed" to his or her own parents, because "coming out" is a personal decision that everyone gets to make in his or her own time.   

By not requiring schools to alert parents of a child's concerning behavioral trait of asking to be treated as the opposite sex, the school is "letting teachers do their jobs, creating a safe and welcoming environment where children can learn."  What they need to be doing is letting parents do their job, and teachers should stick to education.  

And always, always, this undercurrent: If your child doesn't "feel safe to share her identity with you," then you parents are the problem.  Senator Newman, in the hearing, implied that had Aurora been a better parent, her daughter would not have kept a secret, ignoring the fact that the school counselor told her daughter to lie to her mother.

This is where California finds itself today.

"Born in the wrong body" is truth to be told to children.

Lying is safety. 

Public is private.

Deception is respect.

Schools are the safe places.

And parents are the problem.