Legal Docket: When schools keep secrets

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It for this 1st day of September, 2025. We’re so glad you’ve joined us today. Good morning and happy Labor Day. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket.

Today, a fight in California that boils down to this:

Whether teachers in public schools can be forced to keep a child’s gender identity a secret from parents.

Some educators are saying that compels them to lie, and they argue it violates their faith and free speech.

REICHARD: The case could wind up at the U.S. Supreme Court … especially now that California has made secrecy the law for every public school in the state—not just this one near San Diego.

MONTAGE: “Two Escondido teachers are suing the Escondido Union School District and the California Board of Education…”/“…saying that a district policy about students’ gender, identity privacy forced them to lie.”/“The school policy prohibits teachers from revealing to parents if a student changes their gender pronouns.”/“Once a student makes known that they have a preferred name or preferred pronoun, only people with a legitimate need to know that information can be told.”

EICHER: Under the rule, parents are considered not to have a legitimate need to know. Same with the state law, sponsored by California Democrat Susan Eggman, a state senator.

EGGMAN: How dare a school district, not knowing what was going to happen to me at home, take it upon themselves to share something personal about me that I hadn’t felt comfortable sharing at home so why would the school feel compelled to do that? This bill simply says schools cannot pass policies that mandate teachers become the gender police for students.

REICHARD: For Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori West, that means the local policy they objected to is now the statewide rule.

In California, and elsewhere across the country, schools are putting policies in place that require teachers and staff to affirm whatever identity a student asserts. That could mean new names, different pronouns, and sometimes, different identities altogether—completely dependent upon who is in the room. And parents kept in the dark.

I’ve called and emailed the school district and have gotten no reply.

EICHER: But here’s what supporters say about policies like this. Not every home is safe. Not every parent will respond well to such news. California State Senator Scott Weiner.

WEINER: I admitted to myself that I was gay when I was 17… it still took me three years to tell my parents. For any LGBTQ person, it is their business and their business only when, whether, how they tell their parents.

That’s the argument: that schools need to be a safe space until students are ready to tell their families—if ever.

But two middle school teachers in Escondido, California, say it’s not the school’s business to direct educators in effect to deceive parents. They say their consciences wouldn’t allow for that.

So educators Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori West felt they had no recourse but to sue.

REICHARD: I interviewed them along with their lawyer, Paul Jonna of the Thomas More Society. Mirabelli and West have nearly 60 years of experience between them, and each has been named Teacher of the Year. Mirabelli is retired now, but as she looks back, she says she wasn’t prepared for the day the policy took effect.

MIRABELLI: I was stunned. I was shocked. I couldn’t believe that they were asking me to violate the most fundamental ethics of an educational professional of serving parents, partnering with parents, informing parents. It was untenable.

She and West asked their superiors when parents would be notified, but the district never answered.

From court documents the school district’s filed so far, though, its defenses are numerous. Among them: they claim the policy is government speech, which the school has authority to regulate. It contends the policy is neutral and generally applicable, applying across the board without singling out any religious belief. Also, individual defendants have qualified immunity from being sued. And the district also argues it doesn’t force teachers to “lie,” saying “it is not a lie to not answer a question.”

EICHER: But Elizabeth Mirabelli does see it as lying. and her experience leads her to believe that it harms the students:

MIRABELLI: I thought it was teaching children to be duplicitous, to start building a double life where they could be one persona with their friends and the adults who confirm that, and then they would go home and have a completely different story, a completely different personality shall we say with their own family and I knew from working with youth for so many years, I knew that would be confusing and it would be harmful.

Her colleague Lori West remembers it as well:

WEST: You know, the funny thing is they looked at it as we were just asking you to withhold information. In fact, they gave us a statement. If a parent was to directly ask us a question, we were to say, this was beyond the scope of this meeting.

Both of these women are Christians. For West, keeping secrets from parents was a direct violation of her faith.

WEST: We believe God created man and woman and for them to procreate and have that family and raise them up according to the Christian standards. It’s scary….Co-workers we’d known for twenty years turned nasty. It felt like an alternate universe.

REICHARD: The two teachers tried to find some middle ground. They offered to use last names in lieu of pronouns. The district allowed that, but it would not compromise when it came to keeping secrets from parents.

WEST: They needed us to lie to parents, and that was just too far.

EICHER: Feeling they had no options left, they turned to the nonprofit law firm Thomas More Society. Here’s lawyer Paul Jonna:

JONNA: it's a sort of a basic concept that lying is wrong and that we should be truthful when we speak to parents, especially teachers. So in that sense, the policy violates all the teachers first amendment rights of free exercise. it violates their free speech rights, it also violates parents’ rights under the 14th Amendment.

That argument got some traction in federal court.

Jonna points out these school policies form what one judge has already called a “trifecta of harm.”

REICHARD: In 2023, US District Judge Roger Benitez blocked the Escondido policy against Mirabelli and West while the case goes forward.

EICHER: Here’s the way Judge Benitez put it:

He said the policy harms children. Children may need parental guidance. They may need mental health care to sort out whether the issue is organic — or whether it comes from bullying or peer pressure.

He said the policy also harms parents. It deprives them of their Fourteenth Amendment right to guide and make health decisions for their children.

And he said it harms the teachers. It forces them to conceal information they believe is critical to a child’s welfare. And that, he said, violates their religious convictions.

REICHARD: It isn’t just teachers. Parents are suing too.

One family, identified in court as Jane and John Poe, learned their daughter was identifying as a boy after she attempted suicide. Doctors told them what the school kept from them.

Jonna argues that California’s privacy defense doesn’t hold up:

JONNA: They're saying kids have privacy rights that allow them to keep something a secret from their parents that the whole school knows about. but their own parents can't find out about it while everyone else knows about it I mean, honestly it’s just a ridiculous argument on its face.

Meanwhile this past March, the Trump administration’s Department of Education opened an investigation into whether California’s policies violate FERPA, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. That guarantees parents access to their child’s educational records.

Here’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon on March 27 announcing the probe:

MCMAHON: Parents have the right to be informed about what is happening with their children in school. And so for those schools that are allowing counseling for transgendering or encouraging children without parental consent. We just cannot allow that, and we're not going to stand for it.

Jonna says that federal pressure helps his case, but it isn’t decisive.

JONNA: So the policies, by the way that we're talking about, these were mandated by the state of California, the California Department of Education. This isn't just a one-off school district. These are statewide policies. In fact, they're really nationwide.

EICHER: The case, Mirabelli v Olson, heads into a hearing later this month. The court will consider certifying the case as a class action.

California parents and teachers are watching closely.

Supporters of the policy contend that secrecy prevents harm and saves lives.

Here’s Christy Hurst testifying to the state Education Committee:

HURST: Every time a district even discusses forced outing, students are sent into crisis. This policy is destroying the fabric of my community and our district iis on track to hit $1 million in legal fees...

REICHARD: So what of the state’s argument that secrecy protects vulnerable children from rejection or abuse at home? Mirabelli and West push back on that:

WEST: There’s laws in place. Child protective services. These policies assume that parents are going to react badly. They're almost finding the parents guilty without any evidence.. We, as teachers, give parents bad news all the time. Bad grades, your kid got in a fight, your kid stole something. But we give all the information about a child to the parent… . Most of these kids have other issues like a divorce or a cancer or a death or there's something else going on in their life. And it doesn't seem like they're taking time to actually find the root causes of what's troubling these children.

These teachers say this fight isn’t only for themselves:

MIRABELLI: The battle that Lori and I are fighting is for our profession and the trust and respect for teachers and any other teacher out there who feels alone, coerced, trapped, and threatened, because they're silenced and they're marginalized, we are fighting so that we can do our jobs and do them with integrity.

The outcome here could shape policies in schools across the country. And it could still wind up at the US Supreme Court.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket!

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