Mom sues school board over daughter’s social transition

Amber Lavigne only had three minutes to speak during a December school board meeting, but she made the best of it. Her voice shaking with emotion, she dressed down the members of the Great Salt Bay Consolidated School District Board in the small town of Damariscotta, Maine, for socially transitioning her 13-year-old daughter to the male gender without her knowledge. A 26-year-old male school social worker had provided a chest binder to her daughter and instructed her on how to use it.

“She is a minor child—my minor child,” said a shaking Lavigne. “A social worker at the school encouraged a student to keep a secret from their parents,” she told them. “This is the very definition of predator sexual grooming. Predators work to gain a victim’s trust by driving a wedge between them and their parents.”

In a 21-page complaint filed in U.S. District Court last week, attorneys for Lavigne allege that Samuel Roy, a social worker at Great Salt Bay Community School, gave Lavigne’s daughter the chest binder in his office. He told her he was not going to tell her parents about it. Nor did she need to tell them, he said.

According to the complaint, Roy and some other school officials started addressing her daughter with male pronouns. Roy also gave her a second chest binder—both of which Lavigne discovered when she was cleaning her daughter’s room on Dec. 2. Lavigne said she had never met Roy and did not know her daughter was talking with him.

Just days after Lavigne found the chest binder, she met with Principal Kim Schaff and Superintendent Lynsey Johnston. In a second meeting, according to the lawsuit, Johnston told Lavigne that the school did not violate policy by giving chest binders to her daughter or by calling her by a different name and pronouns without informing her parents. That was enough: Lavigne pulled her daughter from her eighth-grade class mid-year and began homeschooling her.

Less than a week later, agents from the Maine Office of Child and Family Services visited the mother of three, informing her they had received an anonymous report that her daughter was being emotionally abused. They talked with Lavigne and her daughter. A month later, the social services agency closed the investigation, finding no evidence of abuse.

An unknown caller or callers made false bomb threats against the school and its employees in December and January, forcing the school to close for a total of three school days. In a January letter included in the complaint, the board said “certain parties are spreading a grossly inaccurate and one-sided story” involving school nondiscrimination policies including, but not limited to, sexual orientation and gender identity. While acknowledging that “parents generally have a right to access the educational records of their children,” the board said students had a right to receive mental health services without parental consent and to develop a “confidential counseling relationship with a school-based mental health services provider.”

Lavigne’s lawsuit rests on the constitutional right of parents to control and direct the care, custody, education, upbringing, and healthcare decisions of their children—a right rooted in the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process. The constitutional provision has been the basis for the Supreme Court’s recognition of other fundamental rights in U.S. history and tradition—though not without controversy, as in its recognition of a right to same-sex marriage.

Adam Shelton, an attorney with the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, a conservative nonprofit that brought the lawsuit on Lavigne’s behalf, pointed to the Supreme Court’s longstanding recognition of parental rights. In the 1923 ruling Meyer v. Nebraska, the court struck down a state law prohibiting teaching grade school children in any language other than English, concluding that teachers at a private Lutheran school had a right to teach in German. The court ruled that parents have a constitutional right to control what language their children are instructed in. Two years later in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, the court also overturned an Oregon law that outlawed private education.

More recently, in its 2000 Troxel v. Granville decision, the court said a Washington law allowing anyone to petition the state to allow visitation with children violated parental rights.

While the court recognizes parental rights as fundamental, Shelton said it has yet to clarify when the government can override parents. “To a certain extent, the parameters to the right are still a bit fuzzy as far as what level of scrutiny courts are going to apply,” Shelton said. He noted that “for most cases that are about fundamental rights, the Supreme Court applies strict scrutiny.” He pointed to Troxel, in which Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion suggested that the highest level of review should apply.

Similar lawsuits, though initially unsuccessful, are still winding their way through appeals. In September, a federal judge declined to block an Iowa law letting students choose to identify as the opposite sex at school, including going by another name, while instructing teachers, counselors, and administrators not to tell their parents. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on a closely watched appeal in February. A ruling could come anytime.

In December, a federal judge also ruled in favor of a Massachusetts school board, concluding that the school’s policy of keeping students’ gender identities secret did not violate parents’ rights. U.S. District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni cited the state’s anti-discrimination law in dismissing the claim, saying that while parents may choose to send their children to public schools, they do not have a constitutional right to dictate how schools educate children. Parents appealed the decision, with Goldwater, Alliance Defending Freedom, and multiple other parents’ rights organizations and states’ attorneys general weighing in.

In Damariscotta, Roy still counsels students as Lavigne and other upset parents wait for the resolution of a case that could play out over several months or even years. At a January school board meeting, Ed Thelander, a parent of former students at the school, summed up many parents’ concerns about the policy of secrecy. “It is extremely disturbing that something like this happened,” said Thelander. “It’s absolutely beyond comprehension, beyond words.” For Lavigne, it’s about more than policy. It’s about her daughter.