Parental notification policies are spreading across the Southern California and the country. What does that mean for students?
By Sullivan Barthel
The forum was held at one of the Chino Valley Unified School District’s high school auditoriums to accommodate a crowd of hundreds. Outside, in late July, the heat was almost 100 degrees.
The school board’s president had reminded the audience not to cheer or interject, as the meetings were “known to get a little heated.” The California state superintendent had been kicked out of the meeting.
Leila, whose last name is omitted because she’s a junior in high school, was used to it. She had been to every school board meeting for a year and a half, starting before she was fifteen. On this night, she held the phone from which she was reading with both hands and leaned into the microphone.
“CVUSD is majority not-safe to many students in this district,” she said. “Remember that there are parents out there who are not like mine. There are students who fear for their lives — in fact, this Board is like that.”
Leila was referencing Board Policy 5020.1, which the CVUSD Board would approve by the end of the night. The Board named 5020.1 a parental notification policy; its opponents frequently call it “forced outing” instead. Under the policy, CVUSD faculty and staff would be required to notify a student’s parents if the student requests to go by a different name than what is on their official records or use a sex-separated facility, like a bathroom or locker room, that does not match with the gender on their official records.
In effect, the policy would require teachers to notify a student’s parents if the student is transgender.
That meeting where Leila took the stand was in July 2023. It took less than three months for a judge in Southern California to put parts of the policy on pause, holding that CVUSD likely violated transgender students’ equal protection rights. For nearly two years, over a dozen other California school districts have proposed and approved similar policies. In the meantime, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a bill in January 2025 preventing school boards from enforcing them.
What’s happened in California’s suburban, more conservative Inland Empire is symptomatic of a larger trend across the country: a movement, even in blue states, to stigmatize and restrict LGBTQ people, especially transgender people and students. Nineteen states have passed laws that mandate outing transgender youth to their parents or create a “hostile school climate,” according to Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that tracks LGBTQ equality. Less than two-thirds of Americans support protecting trans people from discrimination.
But in California, advocates for LGBTQ rights celebrated a victory. Newsom’s bill was the first of its kind, and was hailed as a milestone protection for students. That was until March 27, when the Trump administration’s Department of Education asserted that the violated parental rights — an argument commonly made to support book bans, “don’t say gay” laws and parental notification policies — and announced it would be investigating the entire state’s education system.
What happens next will weave its way through the federal and state governments, and likely the court system. While it does, though, the livelihoods and lives of teachers, parents and their children hang in the balance.
The Legislators
llison Barclay heard of parental notifications long before they reached Temecula.
There was “Don’t Say Gay,” a 2022 law banning discussions of gender identity and sexual orientation for some grade levels, in Florida. There were copycats throughout the South and Southwest. And there was California’s state senate bill, which had died in its first committee review.
Then the proposal had spread to cities in the Inland Empire, an area of Southern California home to 4.6 million people. Temecula, known for its wineries, hot air balloon rides and historic Old Town, houses about 110,000.
Barclay was appointed to the Temecula Valley Unified School District board in November 2021 to fill a vacancy. She said she originally had “no interest in politics at all.” As a parent in the district and the CEO of a Boys and Girls Club, her appointment was relatively painless — she filled out an application, interviewed in public and was sworn in on the same day.
A political firestorm was waiting for her. During Barclay’s time on the board, audiences at the meetings grew by the hundreds and often became rowdy. Some newly elected members shouted at each other over mask mandates and pride flags, and others refused to speak to her. Barclay isn’t alone in her experience; several Southern California cities have seen shake-ups in which more conservative candidates are backed, usually by churches or political organizations, to take over and reorient school boards.
Parental notifications finally made their way to Temecula by way of Chino. CVUSD had quoted, at some points verbatim, the failed Senate bill that would have outed transgender students to their parents. Their policy was copied and pasted across the Inland Empire: districts including Temecula, Murrieta, Orange, Rocklin and Anderson all proposed policies using identical language. Altogether, over 95,000 students could be subject to parental notification.
“The motivation [behind the policies], I believe, is fear,” Barclay said. “Thinking that … your child is making decisions without you, you want to be a part of those big decisions. I think that’s what scares parents. In their minds, there are other people pressuring their kids into making decisions.”
"The motivation behind them, I believe, is fear."
In each of the policies, school boards state their intent to “restore trust between school districts and parent(s)/guardian(s)” and to “promote communication and positive relationships.” However, mental health experts stress that outing is never acceptable. LGBTQ teenagers who are outed to their parents are more likely to have depressive symptoms and unsupportive families, according to a national survey. The survey also found that a staggering 46% of transgender and nonbinary young people have seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.
And school boards themselves can betray a different intent. While Chino Valley Unified School District passed its parental notification bill, Sonja Shaw, the board’s president who introduced the policy, said that transgender students need “non-affirming” parents so that they can “get better,” according to court filings.
Sonja Shaw speaks in support of CVUSD’s parental notification policy on July 23, 2023.
(Screenshot by Sullivan Barthel)
Shaw said in an interview that she never supports social transitions — or non-medical steps to treat transgender people as a different gender than their sex assigned at birth — for students. She said that adults can do “whatever the heck they want,” but that students aren’t developed enough to be making decisions about their gender.
Doctors regularly endorse gender-affirming care, such as social transitions, because it greatly improves transgender and nonbinary students’ mental health and well-being.
Shaw doesn’t think that the opponents to the parental notification policies actually care about students.
“Most of the opposition I see in there are not even parents. They’re in there screaming, ‘hail Satan,’” she said. “Those are the people that, in my opinion, have no business being in the position of being around kids to begin with.”
She also said that Newsom’s January bill, which prevents California schools from enforcing parental notifications, was a way to “bully people” and a direct response to CVUSD’s policy. She said she hopes the Trump administration will find it unconstitutional.
Several cities over, Barclay said Temecula families would appreciate the bill if they understood what it said.
“It’s actually a balance, because teachers can inform parents if they feel it’s necessary, but they’re not forced to,” she said.
To her, the bill is a way to keep students safe.
“Really what it should be is that teachers can refer [a transgender student] to a counselor, and the counselors are trained,” Barclay said. “Always the goal, even in our district, forever, has always been to help kids talk to their parents … but if they need to come confide in the teacher about something personally — kids do that all the time.”
“But if they need to come confide in the teacher about something personally – kids do that all the time.”
Barclay and her fellow TVUSD board members were named as defendants in a lawsuit based on the parental notification policy. But she no longer serves on the TVUSD board. After her appointment in 2021, she had to run for re-election in 2022; a race in which she kept her seat. She ran again when her seat was up in November and lost by about 1,800 votes to her more conservative opponent.
In December, Temecula unanimously rescinded its parental notification policy after a California court found it to be unconstitutional.
An hour away in Chino, Sonja Shaw is committed to continuing the fight.
The Teenagers
n the the fall of 2023, Moxxie Childs got a phone call. On the other line was his friend, who was inconsolable. TVUSD had just proposed its parental notification policy, and Childs’ friend was out as trans at school but at not home. The day before, Childs' friend, had talked to Great Oaks High School about changing his name on the attendance sheets in a way that wouldn’t notify his parents.
“I kind of calmed them down. I basically explained, ‘The policy is not in effect yet,’ and since they’re not 18, their parents can’t kick them out of the house, ” Childs said.
“Both of those things ended up not being true.”
An adult at school “took it upon themselves” to out Childs’ friend based on the policy, and his parents put him out.
With the help of a community-made GoFundMe and the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that focuses on suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth, Childs’ friend was able to get set up with housing and resources. He's now in college, and Childs, 18, is finishing his senior year of high school at Great Oaks.
School wasn’t the same for Childs, though. After his friend was outed, “everyone kind of went into panic mode,” he said. The idea that an adult at the school would voluntarily out a student to their parents — even before the policy was voted on and passed — terrified his friends. Childs estimated he knows between 20 and 30 students at Great Oaks who were worried the school would out them to their parents.
Students at Great Oaks High School walk out over TVUSD’s flag ban.
(Photo courtesy of Moxxie Childs)
Although Temecula never reported official outings based on their parental notification policy, interviews with students in the city’s high schools show that teenagers were outed by adults who were inspired by the policy or the climate that it created.
Shaw of the Chino Valley Unified School District said the schools had outed more than 10 students to their parents before a judge found its parental notification policy unconstitutional.
Childs, Barclay and Leila all described a “chill” in the high schools, where trans or nonbinary students are afraid to come out or are anxious about the way they present themselves. They fear that school faculty or staff will out them, and in the more evangelical Inland Empire, their families may not accept them.
And even if they do, it’s not necessarily safe to speak out on behalf of others.
Leila started attending CVUSD Board of Education meetings with a group of friends “to advocate for the student perspective [in Chino Hills],” she said. But she recounted an instance in which she had to be escorted out of the meeting by a security guard because adults were crowding around her.
“A lot of parents are obviously discriminatory against members of the LGBTQ community. Some can even be racist or sexist, and that definitely [emanated] from these school board meetings,” Leila said.
She recalled a meeting when her friend had been spat on by a parent on his way out.
Moxxie Childs speaks at Great Oaks High School’s walkout.
(Photo courtesy of Moxxie Childs)
Teachers at the schools face a different kind of pressure.
“I’ve had young teachers asking me, ‘What do I do? What can I do?’” said Jennifer Scharf, an English teacher at Great Oaks High School in Temecula. “And I of course have to reassure them that, ‘You’re not going to have a stream of kids coming in to ask permission to … get hormones or to change their name legally.’”
Scharf has been teaching at Great Oaks for 17 years. In that time, she’s seen the Board of Education become increasingly conservative and push for what it calls parental rights. She said that their concerns are overblown; in all her years of teaching, she’s only had two students ask her to keep a secret from their parents.
“It just puts a wedge between the teachers and the students we work so hard to build rapport with them; to get them to take academic risks. And if they’re worried about their gender identity or their sexuality [getting reported] … I don’t want them worrying about that in class. I want them thinking about their thesis statement,” she said. She was sure that other teachers felt the same.
"I don’t want them worrying about that in class. I want them thinking about their thesis statement."
Scharf, Childs and Leila are all involved in advocacy against parental notification policies in their school districts. For them, Newsom’s bill was a momentary relief. Now that it’s being challenged, they’re worried that the wins they thought they had made could be lost.
Still, Childs is motivated.
“It took me a very long time to find any community or sense of myself,” he said. “I know there’s not a lot of community in Temecula. I found most of my community online, and I’d like there to be community in areas like this.”
He’s determined to keep it.
The Nineteen
Inland Empire cities that passed the policies are home to about 100,000 students. The 19 states with LGBTQ-specific censorship laws are home to about 19.4 million more. That’s more than a quarter of all the children in American public schools.
Nineteen states — shown here in orange — have at least one censorship law targeted at LGBTQ people.
(Sourced from the Movement Advancement Project)
LGBTQ children are under threat. These laws mean one of their most personal decisions — who to trust with their identity — would be made for them.
The concept of a parental notification is relatively recent; before 2022, the idea of calling a student’s parent against their will to out them might have seemed outlandish.
But the idea is popular. Nearly half of Americans support criminalizing the act of providing gender-affirming care to minors. It’s the reason Shaw got a standing ovation at the Board of Education meeting where she introduced and passed CVUSD’s policy. It’s the reason why the policies are spreading so rapidly, even in solidly blue states like California.
It's also the reason why some of Leila’s best friends are the high schoolers with whom she spends Thursday night school board meetings, why Childs made headlines for passing out over 500 banned pride flags at Great Oaks High School and why Scharf has been teaching for 24 years. It’s the reason I devoted my last semester of college to this reporting.
Coming out can open the door to love that’s unimaginable to someone in the closet. It opens the door to a strong, vibrant, thriving community.
It’s beautiful and transformative. And it’s the most personal decision a person can make. ◊
This photo was taken at a high school prom in 2021, about two months before I was outed as gay. It had been my biggest secret for four years. While I’ve since come to feel at home in the LGBTQ community, I was initially humiliated and ashamed of my identity. Choosing who to come out to and when is an incredibly personal decision, but one that I wasn’t able to make for myself. It’s my hope that when other queer people make that decision, they will be met with the same love and support I received. To that end, I hope that my work in this piece will help those also pursuing a more accepting world.
Opening video credits:
Chino Valley Unified School District — Meeting of July 23, 2023; Protest footage courtesy of Moxxie Childs; President Trump Signs Executive Orders — April 23, 2025
