Bonta Sues to Keep Parents in the Dark

The lawsuit comes after a federal investigation sparked by a California Justice Center complaint exposing FERPA violations.

Just weeks after a federal investigation found that the California Department of Education had “egregiously abused its authority” by hiding students’ gender transitions from parents, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued to stop federal enforcement actions — the latest move in his crusade to keep parents in the dark.

In January, the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) announced findings that California Department of Education (CDE) policies are in “continued violation” of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) — the federal law guaranteeing parents access to their children’s education records.

The federal investigation was launched in March 2025 in response to a complaint CPC’s California Justice Center filed with the U.S. Dept. of Education, alerting federal officials that California Assembly Bill 1955 — which went into effect in January 2025 — violated FERPA.

Following a 10-month federal probe, SPPO found that California’s policies and practices create “powerful state-directed pressure for schools to adopt policies that have led to FERPA noncompliance.” FERPA prohibits the U.S. Department of Education from funding schools

having policies that deny, or which effectively prevent, parents from exercising their right to inspect and review the education records of their children. This is not discretionary, but mandatory.

As the SPPO explained in a press release last month:

“Instead of ensuring compliance with FERPA as a recipient of Federal funding, California state laws, guidance, and legal actions – such as AB 1955, which prohibits schools from requiring parents to be informed of their child’s ‘gender transition’ – have effectively coerced districts to withhold information from parents in violation of FERPA. 

… SPPO further determined that the CDE coerces school districts to withhold information about students’ ‘gender identity,’ including through the use of secret ‘gender support plans’ kept in separate filing systems for the primary purpose of hiding these records from parents. The CDE’s guidance asserts these plans are not part of a student’s cumulative record accessible to parents, which directly violates parents’ rights under FERPA to inspect all education records related to their minor children.” (emphasis added)

In other words, rather than comply with federal demands to bring California into alignment with FERPA, Bonta has spent 10 months advancing a legal hat trick: sending a series of notices to school districts advising school officials that they are required to comply with FERPA, while at the same time insisting that “there is no conflict between AB 1955 and FERPA.”

Indeed, in his February lawsuit, Bonta continues to argue that gender support plans and other “unofficial” documents related to a student’s gender transition do not qualify as “education records” under FERPA at all.

Bonta’s complaint states:

“Even when a parent does submit a request pursuant to FERPA, the statute does not impose a duty on state educational agencies to disclose information, documents, or other materials that do not meet the statutory definition of an ‘education record.’”

That’s what AB 1955 was created to do in the first place: create legal cover for schools keeping secret “unofficial” school records about students. State legislators rushed to pass the bill as lawsuits challenging the state’s secrecy policies were making their way through the courts. Now, Bonta is doubling down on encouraging school districts to keep secret records from parents.

“In California, teachers have been placed in an impossible position: either adhere to the State’s guidance telling them to keep secrets from parents and therefore violate federal law, or comply with FERPA and risk losing their jobs,” said Emily Rae, president of the California Justice Center. “Attorney General Bonta and Superintendent Thurmond are doing everything they can to confuse and intimidate school officials.”

“Bonta and Thurmond are creating an environment where school districts are terrified that if they follow FERPA, the State of California will sue them,” Rae said.

To understand what Bonta is defending — and what school districts are actually doing — federal investigators provided the following examples in their report:

• The San Francisco Unified School District’s Administrative Regulation 5145.4 lists “keeping a student’s unofficial record separate from the official record” as a “strateg[y]” for keeping “[a] student’s intersex, nonbinary, transgender or gender-nonconforming status” private.
• Mt. Diablo Unified School District provides children the option of deciding where to store their gender support plans. According to the form, only the cumulative file is accessible to parents.
• Alameda Unified School District directs its personnel that they “should not disclose information that may reveal a student’s transgender status or gender nonconforming presentation to others, including parents and other school personnel, unless legally required to do so or unless the student has authorized such disclosure.” To that end, the district “maintain[s] a mandatory permanent pupil record (‘official record’) that includes a student’s legal name and legal gender,” but that may differ from “other school records or documents.”
• Berkeley Unified School District “maintain[s] a mandatory permanent pupil record (‘official record’) that includes a student’s legal name and legal gender.” But it specifically notes in its policy that it “is not required to use a student’s legal name and gender on other school records or documents.”
• Sacramento City Unified School District emphasizes a “distinction between school records and legal documents” as a tool to protect “privacy for transgender and gender non-conforming students.” According to district policy, “[t]ransgender and gender non-conforming students have the right to have their lived name and/or gender marker and/or gender pronouns reflected on all (non-legal) school physical records and documents.”
• In trainings provided to educators around the State of California, Ventura County Associate Superintendent and Las Virgenes Unified School District indicated that schools’ “obligation regarding whether and when to change a student’s name and/or gender in their records depends on the type of record it is under state law, not federal law.” For that reason, the trainings “focus[ed] on the categories of records described in state law, not FERPA.”

(U.S. Department of Education report)

The U.S. Department of Education’s offer for California to voluntarily resolve its FERPA violations is straightforward. California education officials must:

• Issue a notice to all superintendents and administrators informing them that “gender support plans” or other related documentation that is directly related to a student are considered education records under FERPA and are subject to parental inspection upon request
• Publicize that there is no “unofficial records” exception to FERPA and that violations of FERPA risk loss of federal financial assistance;
• Providing written assurance to SPPO that CDE will allow Local Education Agencies (LEAs) to enforce FERPA regarding “gender identity” and pro-parental notification approaches in a manner that aligns with the needs of the districts to ensure compliance
• The CDE must also have the LEAs certify they understand and are in compliance with FERPA, and
• Add FERPA training content that is approved by SPPO to the California Education Code (EC) Section 218.3(b)(1)’s LGBTQ cultural competency training for teachers and other certificated employees.

In response to Bonta’s lawsuit, the U.S. District Court in San Francisco has granted a temporary restraining order, pausing any federal action to withhold education funding while the case proceeds.

Parents who believe information is being withheld about their child at school are invited to contact CPC’s Parent Union for information on how to submit a FERPA request for your child’s records.