Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday turned away a legal battle testing whether a public school violates parents’ rights when it encourages their child’s social gender transition without their knowledge or consent.

In declining the appeal from Massachusetts parents who sued their child’s school district, the high court left untouched a lower court ruling that rejected their claim that their rights had been violated. But the justices may have another opportunity to weigh in on the simmering issue of parental rights in public schools, since a similar case brought by parents in Florida is awaiting action by the high court.

The Supreme Court in October declined to take up a different court fight brought by two Colorado families. But Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, said at the time that the issue involving parents’ rights is of “great and growing national importance.”

In a case on its interim docket, the Supreme Court in March blocked a California law that prevents school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if their child seeks to use different pronouns while litigation moves forward. 

In courts across the country, a growing number of legal battles have been playing out that pit the rights of parents to direct their child’s care against policies that aim to protect students’ privacy and prevent public schools from outing transgender students to their families.

The case that the high court turned away Monday was brought by Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri, whose middle-school-aged child, identified in court papers as B.F., attended public school in Ludlow, Massachusetts. 

The parents claimed the school was “pushing beliefs concerning gender ideology behind the parents’ backs and encouraging their children to question their own identity.” As a result, B.F. began to raise questions about her gender identity and started seeing a therapist, Foote and Silvestri wrote in court papers. 

The parents said they informed the school that they would be getting B.F. professional help. Silvestri instructed school officials not to have private discussions with her child so they could address mental health concerns “as a family and with the proper professionals,” according to filings.

Foote and Silvestri claimed that the Ludlow School Committee, the town’s school board, rejected their request and instead began socially transitioning B.F. without their knowledge. At school, teachers began referring to the student by a different name and pronouns, and the school counselor said B.F. could choose which bathroom to use at school.

But lawyers for the school said it took those steps after the student declared in an email to school officials, “I am genderqueer,” and requested teachers use a new name and “any pronouns (other than it/its).” The parents, meanwhile, said it was the school and staff that encouraged the changes.

Foote and Silvestri alleged that the Ludlow school system has an unwritten policy under which children could decide whether to socially transition at school without their parents’ knowledge or consent. The protocol also directs staff to use a child’s legal name and pronouns based on their sex assigned at birth when communicating with parents, and a student’s preferred name and pronouns at school, they claimed.

The parents filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Ludlow School Committee and officials in 2022, alleging that the school’s actions violated their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children and to make medical and mental health decisions for them. 

A federal district court dismissed the case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit upheld that decision. The 1st Circuit found that parents cannot invoke the Constitution’s Due Process Clause to “create a preferred educational experience for their child in public school.”

“The measures the Parents cite … all involve decisions by Ludlow’s staff about how to reasonably meet diverse student needs within the school setting,” the unanimous three-judge panel wrote in its February 2025 decision. “The Supreme Court has never suggested that parents have the right to control a school’s curricular or administrative decisions.”

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyers for Foote and Silvestri cited a string of rulings dating back to the 1920s that reaffirm that parents have the right to make decisions about the upbringing of their children. The most recent of those decisions came last year, when the high court ruled that Maryland parents have the right to opt their elementary-aged children out of instruction involving storybooks with LGBTQ themes.

“Petitioners do not have a religious objection to their school district’s indoctrination and transition of their children without their knowledge. Theirs is a moral belief, backed by well-supported scientific opinion, that a so-called gender transition harms their children,” they wrote in a filing. “But their constitutional rights to direct the upbringing of their children remain just as fundamental.”

Foote and Silvestri are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization.

They said that more than 1,000 school districts have adopted policies where parents are not informed about gender identity matters involving their children and said the Supreme Court must clarify for lower courts that nonreligious parents “do not relinquish their parental rights when they enroll their child in a public school.”

“Our Constitution’s guarantee of parental rights in a pluralistic society rings hollow for millions of Americans if it offers no protection to nonreligious parents whose children are encouraged to social transition by their public school without their parents’ notice or consent — or over their parents’ vociferous objections,” the parents’ lawyers said.

But the school board and local officials said in a Supreme Court filing that the policy at heart of the case doesn’t exist. Instead, they said school officials attempted to implement state policies and guidance in response to requests from B.F. about the student’s preferred name and pronouns.

That guidance from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education states that “some transgender and gender nonconforming students are not openly so at home for reasons such as safety concerns or lack of acceptance.”

It also encourages school employees to speak with the student first before discussing gender identity or transgender status with their parents, as well as to discuss with the child how the school should refer to them in communication with their family.