Civil lawsuit over Wellington school's GSA club, PSD gender-identity policies dismissed

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed by two families against Poudre School District and its Board of Education over concerns about the Gender and Sexualities Alliance club at Wellington Middle School and the district’s gender-identification policies was dismissed this week by a U.S. District Court judge in Denver.

Summing up her ruling, Judge Nina Y. Wang wrote that case law based on previous rulings by U.S. Circuit Courts and the U.S. Supreme Court recognizes the rights of parents to chose whether to send their child to a public or private school or educate them at home, and “parents have no constitutional right to exercise control over a school’s curriculum or extracurricular activities or to demand information about the same.”

The two families — Erin and Jonathan Lee and their two children; and Linnaea and Nicolas Jurich and their child — filed the civil rights suit May, 3, 2023, claiming their parental rights granted by the 14th Amendment to direct their children’s education had been violated by PSD during after-school meetings of the GSA in May of 2021. At those meetings, the claim alleged, their 12-year-old sixth graders were involved in discussions and lectures and received distributed materials about “sex, sexualities, mental health, suicide, sexual orientation, gender identities and other topics.” They had given no prior consent for their children’s attendance or participation.

Additionally, they claimed the district’s gender-affirming policies on the use of nicknames and pronouns at school that differ from students' legal names and/or gender at birth in official records were discriminatory because one of their children, a 7-year-old first grader at Rice Elementary School, was denied a gender-support plan affirming his status as cisgender while those affirming transgender and nonbinary students were always approved and honored.

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While the first claim, they said, violated the 14th Amendment’s due process, they said the second violated its requirements for equal protection. The minor children plaintiffs are referred to only by their initials in the court filings.

The families were backed by two national organizations, America First Policy Institute and Illumine Legal, in a case that drew national attention from Fox News and several conservative-leaning media outlets.

In dismissing the case Tuesday, Wang cited numerous previous rulings by state and federal courts as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. Among them was this from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2005 ruling on Blau v. Fort Thomas Public School District:

“While parents may have a fundamental right to decide whether to send their child to a public school, they do not have a fundamental right generally to direct how a public school teaches their child.”

The ruling in that case went on to note that parents do not have a right to direct the curriculum, school hours, school discipline, timing and content of examinations, hiring or firing of teachers, extracurricular activities or a dress code. “These issues are generally committed to the control of state and local authorities,” the ruling reads.

A similar ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2005 case, Fields v. Palmdale School District, determined that “Parents have no constitutional right to prevent a public school from providing students whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise, and when and as the school determines it is appropriate to do so.”

J. Brad Bergford of Illumine Legal, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said in an email that the two families “are disappointed in, and disagree with the Court’s ruling. They are considering their legal options for the future.”

PSD had no comment, a district spokesperson said.

Wang’s 46-page ruling in granting the defendants’ request for a dismissal broke down the claims, one by one, dismissing each individually.

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Three of the plaintiffs, she wrote, were minors who do not possess any parental rights that could be violated. And, as previously noted, the parents’ rights afforded under the 14th Amendment are limited in scope and do not extend to control over what is taught in schools, who provides their instruction or what their children are exposed to in the classroom and in extracurricular activities.

She denied the injunctive relief sought by the plaintiffs on the grounds that both families had already removed their children from PSD schools and made no mention of plans to reenroll them in district schools in the future. Their decisions to instead send them to private schools were choices they made on their own and therefore did not entitle them to monetary reimbursement.

Other claims were dismissed because the violations they alleged were not easily discernible or based on state law, which cannot provide the constitutional rights they believe were violated.

“In sum, while the parent Plaintiffs generally have a Fourteenth Amendment fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, they have not adequately alleged a violation of that fundamental right,” the judge wrote.

The discrimination claim based on the school district’s repeated denial of a gender support plan for the then-7-year-old student at Rice Elementary, Wang wrote, did not include any mention of injury or harm related to that denial. The 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, she noted, allows for classifications, and the school district’s policy of providing gender support plans for transgender and nonbinary students that are not available to cisgender students does not violate the rights of the cisgender students.

“The parents fail to allege any injury or harm arising from the request for a gender support plan reiterating (the child's) biological gender and pronouns,” Wang wrote. “His status quo remained the same, and there is no other injury to (the child) evident in the complaint.

“In other words, the Complaint plausibly alleges that (the child) was denied a gender support plan due to his cisgender or non-transgender status but does not plausibly allege that he was denied a gender support plan solely due to his sex.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news.

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Lawsuit against PSD over GSA club, gender-identity issues dismissed