The Chico Unified School Board in Chico, California, voted Wednesday evening to uphold its so-called “parental secrecy policy,” which says that school staff should not reveal a transgender student’s gender identity to their parents without the child’s permission.
The vote comes after the Center for American Liberty filed a lawsuit against the school district on behalf of Aurora Regino, a mother who accused a guidance counselor of helping her 11-year-old biological daughter transition to a male without the family’s knowledge.
Regino spoke ahead of the vote Wednesday evening, saying that she was there to “tell my story so that parents and the public know what is going on in our schools.”
“The day my daughter shared with her guidance counselor that she felt like a boy, the counselor immediately affirmed this new identity,” Regino told the school board.
“From then on, the counselor continued to have one-on-one meetings with my daughter without my knowledge. During one of those one-on-one meetings, my daughter told the counselor that she wanted to tell me about her new identity. The counselor ignored her request and did nothing to support her in letting me know what was going on at school.”
A Colorado school district has a methodical system in place to keep parents in the dark on their child’s gender transition in schools, according to documents reviewed by Fox News Digital.
Leslie Mecca, a counselor at Bear Creek – a K-8 school in the district – sent an email to the Jeffco Public School district’s equity office on August 29, 2022, asking clarification on its recommendations regarding flagging an in-school social transition of a child’s gender. Jeffco defines “transition” as “the steps a transgender person takes in order to align aspects of their life to be consistent with their gender identity.”
In the email, Mecca said that teachers in the school wanted to tell parents about kids’ social transition, including their use of a different name and pronouns.
Mecca said, “In one grade we have about 10 students who identify as a different name and pronoun. They ask teachers to call them by their preferred name and pronouns and our teachers do so. However, our teachers are concerned with parents not knowing.”