Imagine checking your child’s homework folder only to find paperwork labeled with a different name and pronouns. That’s exactly what happened to Dan and Jennifer Mead of Rockford, Michigan. And as they discovered, this wasn’t a folder mix-up—it was part of a school plan to socially transition their child from a girl to a boy while deliberately deceiving and excluding them.
Their story isn’t an isolated incident. More than 1200 school districts, from Alaska and California to Virginia and Pennsylvania, have policies allowing them to socially transition children behind parents’ backs. Fortunately, parents are starting to fight back.
In the Meads’ case, while the school district implemented a name and pronoun change for their daughter, staff omitted the new name and pronouns on paperwork sent home that her parents might see. The principal claimed that it was both district and state policy to treat their daughter as a boy without telling them.
The result was predictable: The Meads’ daughter was taught, in effect, that she was broken and that her parents could not be trusted to help her.
The Meads sued, arguing that the school’s actions violated their rights to freely exercise their religious beliefs and to direct the upbringing and education of their daughter. On Sept.19, a federal judge dismissed the free exercise claim but allowed the parental rights claim to move forward.
Next door in Wisconsin, Tammy Fournier and her husband sued the Kettle Moraine School District after discovering that their 12-year-old daughter was being pushed into social transitioning without their knowledge or consent. They sued in state court, where the Waukesha County Circuit Court ruled that the school’s policy violated “parents’ constitutional right to determine the appropriate medical and healthcare for their children.”
But other parents face a different outcome.
One Massachusetts couple, Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, discovered that staff at their 11-year-old daughter’s school had been socially transitioning her. Staff treated her as “nonbinary,” allowing her to use opposite-sex facilities and conducting regular private counseling sessions with the child. The staff claimed they could not inform the parents without the child’s consent.
In response, Foote and Silvestri sued—but a district court dismissed their case.
In February 2025, a three-judge federal appeals court panel affirmed that dismissal. The judges, appointed by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, said that the parents “failed to state a plausible claim” that implementing this policy “violated their fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their child.”
Foote and Silvestri have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where nearly two dozen states have filed briefs supporting their position.
Gender warriors’ campaign to highjack education isn’t confined to traditional public schools. A bill introduced in the New Jersey legislature in July, for example, would significantly expand state control and monitoring of homeschooling families, requiring them to “align” their curriculum “with the New Jersey Student Learning Standards.” Those standards reflect legislative mandates regarding so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as well as LGBT and so-called climate change instruction.
Another New Jersey bill would require that homeschooling families meet once a year with a public school official for a routine child welfare check.
The New York State Education Department is trying to do the same to Jewish schools by forcing them to provide an education that is “substantially similar” to that of public schools.
Such legislation represents an effort to make non-public education, even in the religious or homeschooling context, more and more like public education in substance.
These strategies fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s repeated holding that parents have a fundamental constitutional right to direct the upbringing, care, and education of their children. The court held a century ago in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, for example, that a child “is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
50 years later, in Quilloin v. Walcott, the court emphasized that “the relationship between parent and child is constitutionally protected.”
And in 2000, the court again held in Troxel v. Granville that “the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.” That obviously includes their education.
Some school districts and state legislatures seem to have either not received, or promptly shredded, this parental rights memo. But those who support education freedom and the fundamental rights of parents won’t stand for that any longer.
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