South Carolina Lawmakers Must Protect Parent Rights. Here’s What Families Need to Know.

It happened again: A parent, this one in South Carolina, has accused teachers at her child’s school of hiding information about him from his family. Fortunately, state lawmakers are considering a proposal to protect parents from educators who insert a wedge between them and their children.

Members of the state’s House of Representatives have advanced a parent bill of rights that says parents have a “fundamental” right to direct the upbringing, education, healthcare, and mental health of their child. The proposal is consistent with essential U.S. Supreme Court rulings that uphold parent rights. The provisions are also consistent with U.S. Department of Education policies that protect parents’ access to a child’s academic and medical information.

Earlier this year, the Education Department found the California Department of Education in violation of federal policy for “pressuring” school officials to withhold student information about the child’s “gender” from parents. The federal agency cited a case in which a California parent sued her child’s school because educators had kept secrets about her daughter’s confusion regarding her sex—similar to the new case in South Carolina.

Unfortunately, the examples from South Carolina and California are not unique. Other suits challenging teachers and administrators over information that may have been kept from families have been filed in Maine, Arizona, Michigan, Massachusetts, Colorado, and New Jersey, to name a few states.

Lawmakers in half of all states have adopted provisions stating that parent rights do not end at the schoolhouse door, including South Carolina’s neighbors in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. Teachers remain mandated reporters and are responsible for documenting safety concerns (potential abuse or neglect), but parents are still their child’s primary caregivers.

The Supreme Court has upheld parent rights in court decisions such as the opinions in Meyer v.Nebraska (individuals have a right “to marry, establish a home, and bring up children”), Wisconsin v. Yoder(parents have a “primary role…in the upbringing of their children” that is “established beyond debate”), and Troxel v. Granville (the U.S. Constitution protects parents’ rights to “make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children”).

And more recently, the Supreme Court issued another ruling in favor of families. The court said that a set of California parents is likely to prevail in a case against the aforementioned California policy because the rules interfere with their rights. The Supreme Court reinstated a lower court ruling that blocked California schools from “misleading parents about their children’s gender presentation.”

The South Carolina teacher union opposes the state’s legislative proposal, calling it “unnecessary.” Yet South Carolina is clearly not immune to cases in which educators keep secrets from parents—or situations in which parents should be the first to know about what takes place in their child’s classroom.

For example, last summer administrators at a North Charleston elementary school hired an art teacher who drew “transcartoons” and promoted “Gendeer (sic) fluid” content online. Parents confronted school officials about the material, and the teacher’s drawings on social media suddenly disappeared—but families may have appropriate concerns that these ideas could wind up in front of their young children.

The South Carolina proposal includes provisions that require educators to allow parents to view the instructional materials that teachers use with students. Such transparency would give peace of mind to parents in North Charleston.

The proposal also gives parents a private cause of action when educators violate parent rights. This legal remedy is valuable for parents when public officials “substantially burden” a family’s rights. Such clauses are part of “strict scrutiny” tests in court and are essential to parent bills of rights because they limit the regulations that lawmakers can impose on families.

The South Carolina proposal met nearly unanimous support (only one member voted against) in the state’s House of Representatives, a rebuke to the state’s teacher union. News of “transcartoons” and teacher secrecy make it difficult to believe special interests when they say protecting parent rights is “unnecessary.”

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