Newsom Signs AB 1955 and Okays Schools Lying to Parents, Opening the Door to Lawsuits and Child Exploitation
SACRAMENTO – Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed into law Assembly Bill 1955, a bill that takes the unprecedented and outrageous step of instructing school districts to lie to and keep secrets from parents about their own children.
Introduced by Assemblyman Chris Ward (D-San Diego), AB 1955 was pushed through the legislature as a “gut and amend” bill — outside of the normal legislative calendar — to invalidate the popular parental notification policies enacted by local school boards across the state. The policies require school administrators to inform parents if their child changes their name or gender on official school records.
Newsom’s new law does the opposite: It instructs school officials to lie to parents if their child changes their gender, name or pronouns at school. The governor’s action is a betrayal of the thousands of California parents and parent advocates who have spoken out against AB 1955 during the rushed committee hearings over the last several weeks.
“We are disappointed to see Gov. Gavin Newsom sign Assembly Bill 1955, legislation that unconstitutionally abrogates parental rights,” said Lance Christensen, Vice President of Education Policy and Government Affairs at California Policy Center. “Public schools are meant to support – not subvert – parents in their efforts to educate their children.”
Christensen warned that Newsom’s new “lie to parents” law violates federal law that guarantees parents’ right to access their children’s school records. He also advised districts against creating two sets of files for a student to keep parents in the dark.
“AB 1955 violates the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act which grants parents universal access to information about their child in their public school,” said Christensen. “Districts that create dummy files to ‘support’ a new gender identity for kids stand to lose federal funding.”
AB 1955 also opens the door to child exploitation. Creating a culture of secrecy from parents at school will lead to unsafe school environments where predators are able to more easily groom vulnerable children. Ward and other AB 1955 sponsors have disingenuously defended their bill as needed to protect students from “forced outing” to unaccepting and abusive parents.
“Gov. Newsom has okayed a bill that was based on the flawed logic that parents are dangerous and not to be trusted, and that the state or strangers are better positioned to deal with the difficulties of adolescence than parents,” Christensen said. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with victims of sex assault by public school employees is evidence that the opposite is too often true.”
