Fairfax County Public School District, located in Northern Virginia, educates approximately 185,000 K-12 students in the wealthy and Democrat-dominated suburbs outside Washington, D.C.
The school district’s public embrace of transgender rights, which includes everything from student restrooms to pronouns, is now in legal jeopardy after the Mirabelli v Bonta ruling in March. That 6-3 decision blocked a 2023 California law that was itself approved by the legislature to overrule several conservative-leaning public school districts that had approved parental rights policies to counter the Far Left’s obsession with transgenderism.
With the Mirabelli decision forcing liberal California to retreat, Fairfax schools is now being threatened with new legal action by law firm America First Legal. The conservative law firm has already sued, and won, to stop Fairfax’s transgender-friendly restroom policy. That litigation, which was settled in December, concluded with a teen girl winning her lawsuit after being represented by AFL.
Describing the newest legal threat on the “Washington Watch” program, AFL attorney Ian Prior said Fairfax schools is secretly hiding a student’s “transition” by keeping any trans-related records separate from other school records that can be reviewed by a parent.
If Fairfax is maintaining what Prior calls “dual-track” school records, the attorney said doing so violates a federal law that guarantees a parent can view their child’s educational records. That law, which dates to 1974, is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.
“What they do,” Prior explained, “is they do not put these requested changes of a student in their official records to avoid a situation where a parent requests the official records, and they don't receive what should be in there as covered by FERPA.”
According to a related Fox News story, the accusation of “dual-track” records is not merely a legal allegation. AFL is aware of a Fairfax schools policy that openly tells teachers not to “out” a transgender student in school district records that parents have legal access to.
That policy further states:
If a student transitioning at school is not ready to share with their family about their transgender status, this should be respected. In this scenario, school staff should make a change socially, calling the student by the chosen name, while their official [school database] information remains the same.
Reacting to Fairfax and its hidden records, show host Jody Hice told Prior he couldn’t believe they were even discussing a school district hiding records from parents.
“This is one of those issues that, just a few short years ago, no one would have dreamed that we would be dealing with this kind of thing, and yet here we are,” Hice observed.
On that topic of parents versus liberal school personnel, Prior said America First Legal is battling other public school districts on behalf of parents, too. His legal advice for concerned and wary parents is to download a free AFL form letter to inform their child's school they don’t approve of hiding pronouns and gender identify from them.
