FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Department of Education under President Donald Trump launched an investigation into the California Department of Education Thursday in a move that could prevent the Golden State bureaucracy from weaseling its way out of a key parental notification lawsuit.

The lawsuit focuses on California school policies preventing teachers from notifying parents if their children identify as transgender while at school—unless the minors give their consent. A federal judge has ruled in favor of teachers who wish to notify parents, but California’s government has attempted to firm up the anti-notification policies. The Trump administration’s move assists the case, a lawyer says.

“This whole empire of gender secrecy policies is going to crumble very soon,” Paul Jonna, a partner at LiMandri and Jonna LLP and special counsel to the Thomas More Society, told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday. Jonna exclusively provided The Daily Signal with a copy of a legal document his team submitted Thursday, drawing the court’s attention to the Trump administration’s latest move.

The Trump Move

The U.S. Department of Education launched an investigation into the California Department of Education for alleged violations of the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act. FERPA, which President Gerald Ford signed in 1974, gives parents the right to access their children’s educational data. The federal department suggested the CDE violated FERPA with guidance applying a new California law prohibiting school personnel from disclosing a child’s “gender identity” to his or her parent.

“It is not only immoral but also potentially in contradiction with federal law for California schools to hide crucial information about a student’s wellbeing from parents and guardians,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a news release on the investigation. “The agency launched today’s investigation to vigorously protect parents’ rights and ensure that students do not fall victim to a radical transgender ideology that often leads to family alienation and irreversible medical interventions.”

If the Department of Education finds the California Department of Education in violation of FERPA, it can terminate CDE’s federal funding.

The Lawsuit

This investigation may help to advance a lawsuit against the CDE and other California entities.

The Thomas More Society represents Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, two teachers who sued their Escondido Union School District over Administrative Regulation 5145.3. The policy mandates that teachers and school staff will immediately accept a student’s expressed gender identity and bars teachers from revealing the student’s claimed gender identity to parents or guardians unless the student consents to notifying them.

The lawsuit included the CDE, because it had disseminated a guidance document urging school districts to adopt anti-notification policies. Parents harmed by the notification bans have also joined Mirabelli and West as plaintiffs in the case.

“We have a child in our case … the parents, they have a child who they found out for the first time that she was identifying as a boy when she was in the hospital bed after a suicide attempt,” Jonna noted. “So, she was identifying as a boy in school. Her teachers and her school staff did not tell her parents, and the parents found out after she almost died.”

In September 2023, Judge Roger T. Benitez in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California ruled in favor of the teachers. He cited nine Supreme Court rulings declaring that “parents have a right, grounded in the Constitution, to direct the education, health, and upbringing, and to maintain the well-being of, their children.”

“That should have ended this discussion and the department should have rescinded the guidance,” Jonna told The Daily Signal. “Instead, what they did was they filed their own lawsuits in state court around the same time and got rulings in state court, based on state constitutional privacy.”

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, directed school districts to adopt policies barring parental notification, citing a state court ruling in an entirely different case. In July 2024, Gov. Gavin Newsom, also a Democrat, signed AB 1955, which bans the few school policies that required schools to notify parents about their minor children’s “gender identity” changes. The bill went into effect in January.

‘Trying to Play Games’

Around the time Trump took office, the CDE withdrew its guidance opposing parental notification, replacing the document with new guidance on implementing AB 1955.

The CDE has asked the federal court to remove it from the Mirabelli case, citing the withdrawal of guidance.

“They’re trying to play games in our case to get themselves extracted from the case,” Jonna told The Daily Signal. He said the U.S. Department of Education’s move will “solidify the commonsense fact that the CDE is still a bad actor. That they need to be restrained in court and enjoined from promoting these dangerous policies.”

Jonna added, “We already have a ton of arguments and evidence that they still need to be in this case,” but the FERPA investigation adds strength to the argument. “We’ve briefed them to death.”

“The damage was already done,” he explained. “The previous page that they had up there forever, and that they sent around everywhere, already resulted in what they wanted, which was every school district has these policies on the books now.”

“The only way they can get out of the case is if they notify every school district in California that these are illegal policies and you cannot enforce them anymore,” Jonna said. “And they’re not going to do that.”

He said CDE has filed five motions to dismiss the case, and the judge has rejected all but the most recent one.

“This is a very unpopular issue for, I think, even moderate Democrats,” Jonna added. “I think you have to be very radical to think it’s OK and it’s good to let 5-year-olds dictate their gender at school and keep that from their parents.”