Seven parents in California just got a federal appeals court to tell the state what most Americans figured out a long time ago: schools don't get to keep secrets about your kids. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, typically a very liberal court, granted a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Sections 5 and 6 of AB 1955, the 2024 California law that prohibited schools from telling parents when their child decided to change genders at school.
Gavin Newsom signed that law. And the Ninth Circuit just drove a truck through it.
The case is City of Huntington Beach v. Newsom, No. 25-3826. A three-judge panel — Daniel Collins, Kenneth Lee, and Lucy Koh — ruled that the parent-plaintiffs "very likely have standing" and that they're likely to win on the merits. The court declared that "parents — not the State — have primary authority with respect to the upbringing and education of children" and that parents "have the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children's mental health."
The panel had actually denied injunctive relief twice before. What changed was the Supreme Court. In Mirabelli v. Bonta, 607 U.S. 492, the high court held that California's school gender secrecy policies likely violate parents' rights under both the Free Exercise Clause and the Due Process Clause. The Thomas More Society brought that case on behalf of California parents and teachers, and it blew the door open for every challenge that followed.
As the Ninth Circuit panel put it: "In light of Mirabelli, AB 1955 thus forbids the mandatory policies that the Constitution requires."
That sentence deserves a second read. The law California passed to prevent schools from notifying parents actually forbids what the Constitution demands. Sacramento didn't just get the policy wrong. They got it exactly backwards.
Nick Barry, Senior Counsel at America First Legal, which co-counseled the case with Schaerr Jaffe, called the ruling "a powerful vindication of parental rights. California cannot use state law to force schoolteachers and administrators into a conspiracy of silence against parents."
Newsom's office hasn't offered a substantive response to the ruling. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who enforced the law from the state education side, is running for governor in November. Whether he plans to campaign on the position that parents shouldn't know what's happening with their own children remains to be seen.
The backstory matters here. After the 2022 midterms, conservative parents started winning school board seats across California and pushing back against what they saw in their kids' classrooms. Sonja Shaw, the board president of Chino Valley Unified School District, led one of the first parental notification policies in the state. Sacramento's response was AB 1955 — a law designed to override those local boards and punish them for siding with parents.
Shaw responded to the Ninth Circuit's ruling directly: "Parents have a constitutional and God-given right to the upbringing of their children. When CVUSD passed a parental notification policy, the state came after us hard. We didn't back down. This ruling is a major win for parents everywhere who believe schools should not operate behind closed doors. This is about accountability, transparency, and restoring parental authority."
The Biden administration called parents who showed up at school board meetings "domestic terrorists." Newsom signed a law to cut them out of their children's lives entirely. The Supreme Court said no. The Ninth Circuit said no. And the parents who got called extremists for asking what was happening in third-period health class are now 2-0 at the federal appellate level.
The state built a wall between parents and their kids. The courts just handed parents the sledgehammer.
