The high court will not rule on whether schools violated parents’ rights to direct their children’s upbringing in accommodating students’ requests to be identified by specific names or pronouns.
Supreme Court takes up Colorado ‘conversion therapy’ case
U.S. Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments over Colorado’s ban on “conversion therapy.”
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court will not decide whether a school violated a parent’s constitutional right to direct their child’s upbringing when addressing a student’s request to be identified by a particular name or pronoun.
A Massachusetts judge rejected the parents’ appeal, even though the court’s conservative majority in March granted an emergency request from California parents to block a state rule barring teachers from outing transgender students to parents.
The question of how schools can best support transgender and gender nonconforming students has sparked intense debate across the country, including other cases the Supreme Court has previously declined to hear.
In the lawsuit, which the court declined to hear on April 20, parents Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri said officials at Baird Middle School in Ludlow, Massachusetts, “covertly facilitated” their child’s “social gender transition.”
In 2021, the student, identified in the lawsuit by the initials BF, sent an email to teachers and other employees announcing that he identified as genderqueer and asking to be referred to by a new name and set of pronouns.
After meeting with BF, the school counselor informed staff that the student was still in the process of sharing information with Foote and Silvestri. The student asked the school to continue using BF’s full name and female pronouns when communicating with parents. The counselor instructed school officials to honor the request, according to court records.
The parents ultimately sued the school district, alleging that the school violated their rights, which are protected by the Constitution’s Due Process Clause.
A federal judge dismissed their lawsuit. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Court of Appeals similarly said the parents had no recourse under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, which courts have interpreted to guarantee fundamental parental rights.
The three-judge panel said the school’s failure to disclose how the student wanted to be presented at the school did not violate parents’ rights, in part because “public schools are not required to provide students with an educational experience tailored to their parents’ preferences.”
The Court of Appeals ruled in February that “so long as a parent objects to a particular academic task, a student’s use of pronouns in the classroom, a decision about bathroom access, or a guidance counselor addressing the student, these concerns do not limit the parent’s rights under the Due Process Clause.” “Rather, parents are questioning how Baird Middle School has chosen to maintain what they consider to be a desirable and rewarding educational environment.”
But last year, the Supreme Court said a Maryland public school district’s refusal to allow parents to read LGBTQ+-themed picture books aloud violates parents’ First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion.
Although the ruling included religious rights, which the parents in the Massachusetts case did not argue, their lawyers argued that “applying similar principles to fundamental parental rights is the next logical step to protect parents who object to gender ideology for moral and scientific rather than religious reasons.”
Lawyers for the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the parents, said in the appeal that “child custody jurisprudence in lower courts is in disarray.” “The court should grant reconsideration and amend.”
