Today Assemblyman Bill Essayli sent a letter to Attorney General Rob Bonta requesting clarification regarding the potential legal breaches Bonta claims have been committed by the Chino Valley Unified School District. In the letter, Essayli seeks to understand the exact legal infractions that prompted the Attorney General’s office to initiate an investigation and the underlying grounds for such an inquiry.
The attorney general of California announced on Friday that he is investigating Chino Valley USD’s new policy to determine whether it violates students’ civil rights. The policy mandates teachers to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender or wishes to adopt a different name or pronoun that differs from what is on their birth certificate.
Assemblyman Bill Essayli wrote to AG Bonta saying, “The need for local school districts to clarify the right of parents to be informed on the affairs of their children is predicated upon faulty advice issued by the California Department of Education (CDE) suggesting that students possess a legally cognizable privacy interest from their parents. The department does not provide any statutory or court authority supporting its position. Never in the history of our jurisprudence have we held that children have a right to privacy from their parents.”
Chino Valley USD school board president Sonja Shaw called AG Bonta’s investigation “a ploy to try to scare all the other boards across California from adopting the policy.” She is absolutely right. There is no legal basis for the investigation. It is clearly meant to intimidate school boards into perpetuating a radical progressive agenda that allows teachers to indoctrinate students behind parents’ backs.
In a press release, Essayli notes that for a century, the United States Supreme Court has upheld the principle that parents, rather than educational institutions, hold the essential authority to raise their children as they see fit. In Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), the Court asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause safeguards parents’ inherent right to guide the welfare, upbringing, and schooling of their children.
Thankfully, AG Bonta is being held accountable for targeting a school board that is simply doing its job of protecting parental rights.
