Maine mom fights for parental rights

An appeals court is poised to decide if school officials violated a Maine mother’s parental rights after they referred to her daughter by a male name and pronouns and gave her a chest binder without informing the mother. An attorney for Amber Lavigne argued before the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday that school officials in Great Salt Bay Community School District in Maine hid critical information about her daughter from her.

In December 2022, Lavigne discovered the chest binder in her then-13-year-old daughter’s room. The device is typically used to flatten a female’s chest to appear more like that of a male. Her daughter said that school social worker Samuel Roy, then 26, gave it to her. Lavigne had not met Roy before.

Lavigne claims that Roy told her daughter that he had no plans to inform the girl’s parents about the binder and that she did not need to tell them, either.

“It hurt as a mom to know that she was keeping a secret,” Lavigne said in a video statement. “But I think it hurt even more to know that adults were encouraging her to keep these secrets.”

Lavigne also learned that multiple school officials had been calling her daughter by a name and pronouns inconsistent with what was on her birth certificate. At no point had school officials informed the mother or asked if they could do this.

Several days later, Lavigne met with the school’s principal, who claimed the school had not violated any policies in its actions. Lavigne decided to pull her daughter out of the school and start homeschooling.

In April 2023, Lavigne filed a 21-page complaint against the school board for violating her constitutional right to control and direct the care and healthcare decisions of her children. The school board had policies and practices that “effectively rendered it impossible” for Lavigne to exercise her rights by “withholding and concealing vital information about her minor child’s asserted gender identity.”

Additionally, she contended the school board had a “pattern and practice of withholding and concealing information respecting ‘gender-affirming’ treatment of minor children from parents.”

In May 2024, a lower court dismissed Lavigne’s case. The judge found that Lavigne failed to plead facts that would “plausibly establish the existence of a permanent and well-settled custom” of the school’s concealment.

Lavigne appealed to the 1st Circuit and on Wednesday, a panel of three judges heard her case.

The judges pressed Adam Shelton, a staff attorney for the conservative nonprofit Goldwater Institute, who represents Lavigne, with numerous questions. They asked Shelton to clarify the precise policy school officials had violated.

Shelton explained that while no written policies directly dictated the school official’s actions, the superintendent’s words affirmed the existence of an unwritten policy or practice. Shelton said that the “crux of this case” is that, after Lavigne complained to the superintendent about the social worker’s actions, the superintendent told her that no policy had been violated.

The judges also asked for clarification on how the officials’ actions constituted a pattern of concealment. Shelton replied that though the main action came from the social worker, multiple school officials treated Lavigne’s daughter as a different gender over a period of time.

“No one ever informed Ms. Lavigne of the situation,” Shelton said. “There’s no indication that any school official would have ever informed Ms. Lavigne of this.”

On the opposing side, school board attorney Melissa Hewey explained that the superintendent’s words had other reasonable explanations. For instance, the superintendent could have been referring to state law or policies regarding how social workers share a child’s information with parents, Hewey said.

Judge Seth Aframe pointed out that the superintendent’s statement is one of several remarks from the school that “you can line up and make an argument that maybe something did happen behind the scenes.”

He continued, “Maybe there was some discussion and we just can’t know that. How do we think about that?”

But Hewey, arguing for the district, told the court that this occurred in a tiny community where an unwritten policy like this couldn’t be hidden.

In an interview with WORLD, Shelton with the Goldwater Institute said he anticipates a final decision in Lavigne’s case sometime in the next six to 12 months.

He said that the Supreme Court has upheld parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children for more than a century. The school violated this by depriving Lavigne of key physical and mental health information regarding her daughter.

Shelton hopes that a ruling from the 1st Circuit in Lavigne’s favor will ensure this situation doesn’t happen to other parents.

“The real impact of this litigation is just trying to ensure that schools protect and respect the rights of parents,” Shelton said. “We hope that what happens with this case is that schools continue to adopt policies that put parents at the center of these decisions with their children.”