A conservative legal group is calling on the Trump administration to investigate a small Alaska school district accused of secretly using different names and pronouns for students at school than the ones disclosed to their parents, Fox News reports.
America First Legal filed a complaint Friday asking the Departments of Education and Justice to open inquiries into Hoonah City School District, a K-12 district in Alaska. The filing comes weeks after the Supreme Court temporarily blocked a similar California policy, a ruling that has set off a wave of legal challenges against school districts nationwide.
The Hoonah district’s policy instructs administrators to use a student’s legal name and pronouns when communicating with parents, even if the student goes by a different name and pronouns inside the school building.
“Hoonah City School District’s nonsensical ‘gender identity’ policies strip parents of their rights, applaud deception, and brazenly violate federal law,” said AFL senior counsel Ian Prior.
AFL argued the policy “requires school staff to present one identity to parents while facilitating another at school, effectively directing them to deceive parents about their own children.”
The complaint arrives as the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has already moved to investigate similar policies at other districts. In recent weeks, DOJ opened a probe into the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest, which serves more than 500,000 students, over a comparable gender identity secrecy policy.
The legal momentum traces back to Mirabelli v. Bonta, in which the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in March to temporarily block California from enforcing a state policy barring school staff from telling parents if their child expressed a desire to transition. The court said the policy was likely unconstitutional. The three liberal justices dissented.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals had sided with California before the high court intervened. Conservative legal groups have since used the ruling to press cases against similar policies in states far outside California.
