In August, Anderson Union High School District Sued the State over California’s SAFETY Act. Here’s What You Need to Know.

The “Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today’s Youth Act,” or  SAFETY Act, was signed into law in July by Governor Gavin Newsom. It will take effect on January 1, 2025.

It will prohibit school districts, including Anderson Union High School District, from requiring staff to automatically notify parents when a child asks to be referred to by a different name or pronouns at school. 

On August 8, AUHSD joined Chino School District in a lawsuit that asks California’s Eastern District Court to declare the SAFETY Act unconstitutional, thereby prohibiting the state government from enforcing it against local Districts, including AUHSD.

The decision by AUHSD to initiate legal action against California was made by the Board during a closed session meeting on July 31. Emily Rae, an attorney with the nonprofit Liberty Justice Center, which represents the AUHSD Board pro-bono, filed legal documentation less than two weeks later. The Chicago-based law firm has also represented other school districts in the state as they’ve embarked on legal battles over school policy regarding students’ preferred pronouns. 

The complaint AUHSD has joined, alleges that the SAFETY Act violates parents rights by “compelling” them to “allow their child’s school” to “socially transition their child to a new gender without their knowledge or involvement.”

In doing so, the complaint says, the state violates the religious beliefs of parents, specially those named as plaintiffs in the suit. Those parents include local Moms for Liberty organizer Leslie Sawyer, whose children were not yet high school age and therefore had not yet attended AUHSD schools at the time the complaint was filed.

It’s important to note that the SAFETY ACT does not compel parents to do anything. Instead, the law stops school districts from requiring staff to automatically notify parents when a child makes either an official or unofficial request for changes in their name or pronouns used at school. 

AUHSD’s legal complaint also contends that the SAFETY Act violates a law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act or FERPA, which protects the privacy of students’ official school records.

But the SAFETY Act doesn’t prevent access to student records, nor does it allow those records to be shared in ways that would impact student or family privacy in violation of FERPA. Instead, as previously stated, the law stops school districts from enacting policies that would require an individual staff member to report a student who officially or unofficially requests to use a different name or pronoun. 

AUHSD’s suit also alleges that the California SAFETY Act violates parents’ First Amendment right to freedom of religion as well as their Fourteenth Amendment “right to parent.” The suit indicates that the SAFETY ACT requires District Board members to violate their Constitutional oaths, by not telling “all parents information to which those parents are entitled under the U.S. Constitution.” 

Since 1923, the Supreme Court has ruled on a number of foundational cases that define the ever-evolving “right to parent.” Some of these rulings enshrined the rights of parents to raise their children according to religious tradition, the right for the state to prosecute parents who expose their children to unsafe living conditions, and the right to access contraceptives and abortion. 

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