Consider the following scenarios: A student asks a teacher to refer to them by a different pronoun or name in class. A teacher overhears a student telling a friend plans to start using different pronouns. Or a student shares privately with a teacher the desire to change genders, requesting confidentiality.
In each of these circumstances, a teacher in the Anderson Union high school district in Anderson, Calif., has 72 hours to call, email, or otherwise share this information with the student’s parents.
The policy—similar to those in districts across the country—is at the center of an emerging legal battle. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed into law last week a bill prohibiting schools from requiring educators to inform parents if a student requests to use a different name or pronouns in school than the ones assigned at birth. Two days later, Jackie Labarbera, the president of the Anderson Union school board, announced on social media that the district would not comply.
Other districts in the state have similar parental disclosure policies, and the Chino Valley Unified school district in Southern California has filed a lawsuit arguing that the new law, which takes effect Jan. 1, violates parents’ constitutional rights.
Parents in a handful of states have also sued school districts over gender-related policies, claiming their 14th Amendment rights are violated when schools fail to inform them that their children have changed their pronouns or names.
At least a half-dozen states have laws that require teachers or administrators to tell parents if their child requests to use a different name or pronouns that differ from the sex assigned at birth.
Teachers are caught in the middle as they navigate the sensitive issue of how to respond in a responsible manner to the growing number of students who are coming out in school as transgender or nonbinary. They have to balance state and local policies alongside their own personal ethics and weigh the trust of their students against their responsibility to parents—all with little to no training or guidance.
Teachers fear potential job repercussions
Education Week reached out to teachers’ unions in three states that have enacted “mandatory disclosure laws” to get their reactions to these policies, but most requests went unanswered. A spokesperson from North Dakota United responded in writing: “I reached out to a teacher who I thought might be interested [in commenting], but she’s concerned about the potential risks of going on record about this legislation.”
The response didn’t come as a surprise to Shaye Stephens, the president of the Anderson Union High School Teachers Association, who said the school board president warned teachers that the district would “follow through with reprimanding teachers” who failed to notify parents about their child’s expression of gender identity.
The district did not respond to Education Week’s requests for comment.
In her Facebook post, LaBarbera wrote that by sticking to its mandatory disclosure policy, the district was seeking to “maintain and, in some cases, restore, trust” between parents and schools, bring parents “into the decision-making process for mental health and social-emotional issues of their children at the earliest possible time in order to prevent or reduce potential instances of self-harm,” and “promote communication and positive relationships with parent(s)/guardian(s) of pupils that promote the best outcomes for pupils’ academic and social-emotional success.”
However, Stephens said a union survey showed that most of the district’s teachers aren’t comfortable with contacting parents to inform them that their children have chosen to go by a different name or pronoun at school.
Teachers are mostly concerned with students’ safety, Stephens said.
“If we call home, or leave a voicemail message, or write a letter home within 72 hours of being made aware that a student is gender nonconforming, how do we ensure the safety of that student?” she said. “There’s a lot of situations where it’s not safe for kids to come out.”
Stephens said that she and her colleagues are left on their own to decide whether they should follow the new state law, when it goes into effect, or board policy. They’re also left to figure out for themselves how to have these conversations with parents, as Stephens said teachers in her district have not received any training on managing this sensitive communication.
School counselors acknowledge the challenges of managing sensitive student situations
Wendy Rock has a lot of experience managing sensitive situations involving students. She’s the ethics chair of the American School Counselor Association and a former high school counselor for nearly two decades in Louisiana. However, she acknowledges that, even as a trained counselor, handling sensitive student information isn’t straightforward.
While confidentiality is the foundation of counselors’ relationships with students, ethical guidelines make clear that in situations when there is serious and foreseeable harm at risk, such as when a student is considering suicide, counselors must break confidentiality and share that information with parents, she said.
Laws always supersede ethical standards involving student confidentiality, Rock explains. “If there’s a school policy in conflict with our ethical standards, we have to follow the school policy,” Rock said.
For counselors who work in a state that has implemented a “mandatory parental [gender] disclosure” policy, this means they are beholden to the law—and not a student’s request for privacy. In these instances, Rock said, one thing counselors can do is to use “informed consent,” letting students know in advance that any sensitive information they share with counselors must, in turn, be shared with parents.
Counselors could help educators communicate with parents
Rock said she’s not aware of counselors being tapped to train teachers or other school personnel on how to have sensitive conversations with parents regarding their children’s gender identity, but suggests that their professional skills could provide some guidance.
Giving students some autonomy over the situation may be helpful, she suggests. That could involve talking first to the student and saying, “How do you want this to go?” before making the call home.
“Counselors have these difficult conversations with parents all the time, not necessarily about coming out, but around other difficult topics,” said Rock. “They know how to have these conversations without escalating potentially charged situations.”
Even so, some teachers remain skeptical. “I do not think that we are the right people to be having those conversations with a parent or a guardian,” Stephens said.
