Image CreditBreccan F. Thies/The Federalist
The U.S. Department of Education found the California Department of Education (CDE) in violation of federal family rights law on Wednesday for facilitating the gender “transition” of children and hiding it from their parents.
California pressured school districts across the state to violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a student privacy and parental rights law, by forcing them to conceal student records from parents about their child’s so-called “gender transition,” according to a senior department official detailing the results of an investigation Wednesday.
“FERPA requires that schools provide access to all education records upon a parent’s request. Schools do not get to choose which records they feel like providing to parents and which ones they don’t,” the official said. “As Secretary McMahon stated last year, this is not only patently unlawful, but morally reprehensible. Children do not belong to the state. They belong to their parents. Parents must know about the most sensitive information pertaining to their child’s health and well-being.”
A Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) investigation found that at least 300 students in California were put on “‘gender support plans,’ many without parental consent or knowledge.” At CDE’s direction, school officials placed the “support plans” in “separate filing systems” to keep parents in the dark about the plans.
As The Federalist reported, school personnel are often some of the first and most influential people a student interacts with regarding confusion about sex and “gender,” and many push children toward “social transition” like name and pronoun changes, which often leads to destructive medical interventions.
The Department of Education stated that one mother sued her daughter’s California school after staff groomed her daughter into believing she was “transgender.” Telling the student to hide her supposed “transition” from her mother, school officials also helped the girl utilize chest binders — a compression cloth used to flatten a female’s breasts so she can attempt to appear more masculine.
According to the Education Department, school leadership told the mother she was not entitled to her daughter’s information based on California’s parental secrecy policy — a clear violation of FERPA.
Some of the “gender transition” facilitation came from a student management software used across California called Aeries. According to the Education Department, California education personnel petitioned this company to create features for hiding name changes, new pronouns, and other information from parents through the parent portal.
California also targeted and sued school districts that would not comply with their secrecy policy and instead followed FERPA, the department official stated.
“Our investigation found that the California Department of Education egregiously abused its authority by pressuring school officials to withhold information about students’ so-called ‘gender transitions’ from their parents. Under Gavin Newsom’s failed leadership, school personnel have even bragged about facilitating ‘gender transitions,’ and shared strategies to target minors and conceal information about children from their own families,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press release. “While the Biden Administration turned a blind eye to this deprivation of parental rights and endorsed the irreversible harms done to children in the name of radical transgender ideology, the Trump Administration will fight relentlessly to end it.”
The Education Department has detailed actions CDE can take to rectify its FERPA violations. Such actions would include telling all school superintendents that “gender support plans” are “subject to parental inspection” and “that there is no ‘unofficial records’ exception to FERPA.”
California risks losing federal funding due to its FERPA violations and has been given two weeks to respond.
Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He is a co-recipient of the 2025 Dao Prize for Excellence in Investigative Journalism. As an investigative journalist, he previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
