Attorneys with Child & Parental Rights Campaign and Alliance Defending Freedom asked the U.S. Supreme Court Friday to hear the case of a Massachusetts family. They are challenging Ludlow School Committee officials for enacting a gender-identity policy that excludes parents from any knowledge or involvement in key decisions regarding their children’s care, blatantly violating parents’ fundamental right to direct their kids’ upbringing, health care, and education.
“Parents—not the government—have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing, education, and health care of their children,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “Mr. Foote and Ms. Silvestri have a moral belief, backed by well-supported scientific opinion, that a so-called gender transition harms children. Yet the Ludlow School Committee has not only enacted a secret social transition policy that keeps parents completely in the dark about their kids, they also blatantly go against parents’ express wishes. We are urging the Supreme Court to take this case and affirm the constitutional protections parents have in making the best decisions for their children.”
When Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri learned that their middle-school daughter was experiencing depression and questioning her gender identity, they hired a private counselor to help her. They informed the school district they were getting their daughter the mental health help she needed and instructed school officials to not have any private conversations with their daughter about these matters.
Attorneys explain in the petition, however, how school officials thought they knew better than the parents. They decided to “socially transition” the girl against her parents’ stated wishes. Officials regularly met with her to assist with and encourage her “transition” to “genderqueer,” with a male name and nonbinary pronouns, and using bathrooms where middle school boys undressed.
Additionally, in regular online private chats with the daughter, the school counselor promoted her identification as “genderqueer” and her use of a male name and questioned her parents’ choice of a mental-health counselor, all without saying anything to her parents. Indeed, school officials actively concealed their activities by using the girl’s real name and pronouns when communicating with her parents but using her male name and nonbinary pronouns at school.
The school counselor instructed middle-school staff that they should not tell the parents about their daughter’s use of a male name without her permission, but one of the teachers eventually did. The school district promptly fired her.
After learning what the school district was doing to their daughter, Foote and Silvestri begged district officials for help. But their efforts were futile. The middle-school principal intimated that the school knew what was best for Foote and Silvestri’s children. The district superintendent approved of the staff’s actions as consistent with district policy. And when the parents again pleaded with middle-school staff to stop, they were ignored.
Later, at a public meeting, the superintendent deemed parental rights a “thinly veiled … camouflage” for “intolerance, prejudice and bigotry against LGBTQ individuals.” And the school-board chair demeaned parents’ concerns about secretly transitioning children as “prejudice and bigotry.”
“The question this case presents is urgent. More than 1,000 public school districts have adopted secret transition policies, resulting in dozens of lawsuits and harming countless children,” the petition filed in Foote v. Ludlow School Committee notes. “The fact that parents reject gender ideology for non-religious reasons does not leave them without constitutional protection.”
In March 2023, ADF attorneys filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit in support of parents’ rights. In February, however, the 1st Circuit ruled against the parents, prompting the petition to the Supreme Court.
