California Won’t Answer Federal Questions on School Gender Secrecy After Mirabelli Ruling

California’s Department of Education told the federal government it would not answer questions about how it handles parental notification after two court rulings found secrecy policies likely violate parents’ rights. This comes after the Trump administration sent a letter to CDE asking for clarity on revisions it has made following the March Supreme Court ruling that temporarily halted policies allowing schools to withhold information from parents regarding gender transition plans for their children.

On July 30, the Trump administration announced it was “demanding clarity” from California and Washington on plans to revise their existing policies following a March U.S. Supreme Court ruling and a June order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“Schools must end the practice of concealing vitally important information about students from parents who love them,” Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) Director Frank Miller said in the announcement. “We are providing California and Washington the opportunity to explain to the Department and the families they serve how they are revising their policies to come into compliance with federal law.”

An open records request obtained by The HighWire found that Len Garfinkel, Counsel for CDE, responded on August 12 and declined to provide any details. Garfinkel said the information requested by the SPPO falls outside the scope of the department’s investigatory powers.

Garfinkel references SPPO’s letter stating parents must have a right to review educational records regardless of student consent, including any potential details about preferred pronouns or a gender support plan. He does not state that parents have an affirmative right to be informed without asking. Garfinkel said Local Educational Agencies (LEAs) have received multiple letters from CDE letting them know that they must follow this FERPA requirement.

CDE maintains that no law precludes parents from accessing their children’s educational records, including Assembly Bill No. 1955. The bill, which was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on July 15, 2024, states that employees of the school district “shall not be required to disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent unless otherwise required by state or federal law.”

The bill states that employees are not required to provide details to parents without the student’s consent, but it doesn’t explicitly require them to keep the information secret. Furthermore, CDE claims that parents still have the right to formally request to view their child’s educational file, which would include any gender transition plan that exists. California parents who oppose the state’s law worry that parents wouldn’t necessarily know they should ask to see the file.

Garfinkel responded to the SPPO and said the questions posed to CDE fall outside the department’s investigatory powers under FERPA, as the two open cases involve constitutional questions.

The open records request asked CDE for information on how it told schools to handle information about a student’s gender identity. The request asked for any guidance or training materials, emails, internal legal opinions, parent complaints, and data on how many students were socially transitioned at school without their parents’ knowledge.

The department did not produce any emails, training materials, complaint records, or student data. CDE said it was withholding some records under legal privileges for confidential attorney communications and internal deliberations.

In the Mirabelli v. Bonta case that reached the Supreme Court, parent plaintiffs alleged that California schools treated their children as a different gender at school for months without telling them. One pair of parents said they learned their junior-high daughter was being addressed by a male name and pronouns only after a suicide attempt. Parents of another child said teachers denied that any transition was occurring when asked directly. Teachers in the same case said they received lists of students using new names, with notes that some parents were unaware.

In a separate California case, the Spreckels Union School District paid $100,000 in 2023 to settle claims by a mother who alleged staff used a new name and pronouns for her child, supplied transition materials, and instructed the child not to tell her. The district settled without admitting liability.

The U.S. Department of Education’s January 2026 findings against the CDE cited a case where a mother said her daughter’s school socially transitioned the child without notice and later told her it was legally barred from being honest about it. The findings described gender support plans kept in separate files as a mechanism that kept information out of the cumulative record parents usually see. In his response letter, Garfinkel said a separate file does not prevent parents from accessing the information if they request their child’s educational file.

In addition to the Mirabelli case that has been sent back to the Ninth Circuit for a ruling on the merits, City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom directly challenges Assembly Bill 1955 (SAFETY Act), which implemented the policy that removes any requirement for school employees to disclose information to parents about the gender identity of their children without the child’s consent. A preliminary injunction was granted for the seven families in the case, but the SAFETY Act is still in effect for the rest of the state.

Peter Breen, Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation at the Thomas More Society, who represented the plaintiffs in the Mirabelli case, told Fox News in March that the Supreme Court order should apply nationwide. “There are over 1,000 school districts currently with some sort of policy that is keeping parents away from the information about their children changing gender at school,” Breen said. “So we are hoping that they voluntarily comply, but we now have a lot of work in front of us to try to get everyone to comply and ensure that parents are brought into these decisions.”

Breen said in his March interview that there were 40 cases pending nationwide. He explained that the experts brought in by the state of California for the case agreed that involving parents is best for the mental health of the children.

Breen explained that his plaintiff teachers were “forced to mislead the parents” about the gender identity of particular students. This was part of CDE’s 2016 Legal Advisory and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). The FAQs stated that disclosing gender identity status without the student’s permission could violate antidiscrimination law and the student’s right to privacy. Schools were required to respect a student’s limits on disclosure, “including not sharing that information with the student’s parents.”

Teachers were told to ask the student how to refer to them in correspondence with the home and at parent-teacher conferences. The guidance also tells schools to protect students from harassment and discrimination with one potential measure of “providing counseling to the student and the student’s family to facilitate the family’s acceptance and support of the student’s transgender status.”

Those guidelines were removed when the SAFETY Act went into effect in January 2025 and replaced with the guideline that school staff “shall not be required to disclose without the student’s consent unless state or federal law otherwise requires it.”

Following the March Supreme Court order, CDE guidance documents include this statement: “Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence. Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian when the student expresses gender incongruence. These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary.”