A lawsuit filed against a Massachusetts school district for not notifying a student’s parents their child identified as genderqueer has been denied by a US appeals court. The case challenged the school district’s policy to respect student privacy rights.
The three-judge panel found the school’s policy “does not restrict parental rights in a way courts have recognized as a violation of the guarantees of substantive due process.”
Reports Reuters:
The case is one of several lawsuits nationally by conservative litigants and parents groups challenging school policies that seek to respect requests by LGBTQ students, including transgender ones, to not “out” them to their parents without their consent.
The Massachusetts parents, Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, argued that staff at Baird Middle School [in Ludlow, Mass.] wrongly concealed from them that their 11-year-old, who was born female, had asked to be identified by a different name and pronouns while at school.
They argued that the nondisclosure policy adopted by the Ludlow School Committee violated their due process rights under the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which courts have interpreted as guaranteeing fundamental parental rights.
But the three-judge panel in an unsigned opinion said that while parents have a fundamental right to be informed about significant aspects of their child’s life and direct them, “parental rights are not unlimited.”
The panel, comprised entirely of judges appointed by Democratic presidents, said the nondisclosure policy adopted by the Ludlow School Committee “does not restrict parental rights in a way courts have recognized as a violation of the guarantees of substantive due process.”
“As per our understanding of Supreme Court precedent, our pluralistic society assigns those curricular and administrative decisions to the expertise of school officials, charged with the responsibility of educating children,” the panel wrote.
The panel included U.S. Circuit Judges Lara Montecalvo, O. Rogeriee Thompson and Julie Rikelman.
Read the complete story at Reuters.com.
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