Judge says Chino Valley Unified can disclose a student’s gender identity to parents when they ask

A San Bernardino County Superior Court judge on Tuesday rejected Chino Valley Unified School District’s request to dissolve an injunction blocking its policy requiring employees to notify parents when students identify as transgender or use different names or pronouns at school.

Judge Michael Sachs upheld his 2024 injunction blocking Chino Valley Unified from enforcing a policy the school board adopted in 2023. The policy required district employees to notify parents within three days if their student asked to go by a name or pronoun different from official school records or join a sex-segregated program, such as athletics, that did not correspond to those records.

The school district had asked Sachs to overturn a permanent injunction after the U.S. Supreme Court issued an emergency docket ruling in a separate case, Mirabelli v. Bonta. The district argued that the ruling affirmed parents’ constitutional right to be informed about information critical to their children’s health and well-being.

Sachs rejected the request, saying his injunction does not conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling. During Tuesday’s hearing, he distinguished between the two cases, saying the school policy at issue in the Mirabelli case required school employees to withhold information from parents when asked.

“The school’s policy essentially mandated that staff lie to the parent about their child, and the court did not accept that,” Sachs said of Mirabelli v. Bonta.

The Chino case involves a different question: whether school employees can be required to disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents.

“There is no mandatory duty for the school district to voluntarily release information about the student,” Sachs said in court.

Chino Valley Unified was disappointed by the ruling, said Emily Rae, the district’s attorney and president of the California Justice Center, a conservative legal nonprofit focused on protecting individual liberty.

“The main problem is that it puts the burden on parents to know whether they’re having a secret kept from them,” Rae said.

Rae said Sachs’ ruling misinterpreted the Mirabelli opinion, which she said made clear that schools should not withhold information from parents. She said it was too soon to say whether the district would appeal the ruling or make changes to any of its policies.

Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley Unified school board and a candidate for state superintendent of public instruction, also criticized the ruling. In an interview with EdSource, she called the proceedings a “kangaroo court” that has caused “so much confusion.”

Shaw said she planned to ask the superintendent whether the district could ask all parents to check a box: “Do you want secrets to be held from you?”

“They shouldn’t have to do that,” she said. “At the end of the day, it’s insane we have to go through all these hoops to uphold a parent’s right to know.”

Christine Parker, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said the ruling was consistent with the Supreme Court’s order in Mirabelli v. Bonta and other applicable law.

“The court got it right: Blanket policies like Chino Valley USD’s, in which school employees must — in all circumstances — disclose a student’s gender identity to their parents, remain unlawful in California,” Parker said in a statement to EdSource.

Another pending case referenced in Tuesday’s proceedings was the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, which hinged on a dispute over AB 1955, known as the SAFETY Act. The law, signed by Newsom in 2024, bars school districts from requiring staff to disclose a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity to parents. It went into effect before the injunction in the Chino Valley Unified case.

In the wake of the Mirabelli v. Bonta case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a preliminary injunction for parents in the City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom who sued to block enforcement of the SAFETY Act.

This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.