The U.S. Supreme Court on March 30 turned away a mother’s appeal after a school district was alleged to have secretly aided her daughter’s so-called gender transition.

The case is part of an ongoing national debate over whether school officials have an obligation to inform parents of a child’s efforts to adopt a gender identity different from sex at birth.

Around 6,000 public schools across the country have policies that intentionally prevent parents from learning information about their children’s gender-identity choices, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch said in a case last year known as Lee v. Poudre School District R-1.

The court on March 30 dismissed the petition in Lavigne v. Great Salt Bay Community School Board in an unsigned order. The court did not explain its decision. No justices dissented.

The case goes back to December 2022, when Amber Lavigne found a chest binder in her 13-year-old daughter’s room. Also known as a chest compression garment, a chest binder compresses and flattens breast tissue to create an androgynous or masculine appearance. Lavigne learned that a social worker at her child’s public school in Maine gave her the binder and that others “socially transitioned” the child by using different pronouns and a masculine name. A school counselor said the child did not have to tell her mother about these practices, according to the petition Lavigne’s attorneys filed with the Supreme Court.

The petition said even though the school had an official policy of notifying parents and involving them in such decisions, no one from the school advised Lavigne what was happening. Lavigne sued the school board under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, a federal law that allows individuals to sue governments for civil rights violations. She alleged that there was an unwritten policy that permitted employees to make these decisions without advising parents. She argued that unwritten policy violated her fundamental right as a parent “to control and direct the upbringing of her child.”

The federal district court dismissed the lawsuit on procedural grounds, finding Lavigne failed under Section 1983 to plausibly allege that the school district’s allegedly unwritten policy caused a constitutional violation. Because the case was resolved on municipal liability grounds, the court did not reach the issue of whether the alleged policy actually violated Lavigne’s constitutional rights as a parent, according to the petition.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed, finding that Lavigne had “not pleaded facts sufficient to establish the existence of a permanent and well-settled policy or custom of withholding and concealing information.” The appeals court also did not accept her argument that the school board ratified the behavior of its employees because the statements made by the board were “too vague” to be considered “active approval” of the employees’ actions. The court held that there was a more likely “alternative explanation” than the existence of an unwritten policy, the petition said.

Lavigne’s attorneys said in the petition that the First Circuit’s ruling did not properly apply the Supreme Court’s pleading standard by accepting the school board’s “alternative explanation” without performing an independent evaluation of the plausibility of her claims.

The school board had urged the Supreme Court not to take up the case, arguing that the lower courts were correct in dismissing the petition on procedural grounds.

Those courts correctly ruled that Lavigne’s allegation that there was an unwritten policy allowing the “concealing” of information was legally insufficient, the board said in a brief.

Contrary to her allegations, “such an unwritten policy does not exist,” it said. The board’s transgender student guidelines, which Lavigne presented to the courts, specifically “require parental involvement when addressing the needs of transgender students,” the brief said.

The First Circuit was correct to rule that Lavigne’s complaint did not meet the Supreme Court’s pleading standard, the brief said.

Lavigne’s attorneys at the Goldwater Institute were disappointed the Supreme Court declined to accept the case.

Goldwater senior staff attorney Adam Shelton said the high court’s rejection of the petition “signals to schools across the country, and especially in Maine, that hiding information from parents does not run afoul of the Constitution.”’

“We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will one day hold that a public school’s policy that permits a social worker to give a child a chest binder and other school officials to socially transition a child without ever telling parents violates the Constitution’s protection for parental rights,” Shelton said.

The Epoch Times reached out to the school board’s attorneys for comment, but no reply was received by publication time.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared March 31, 2026, in The Epoch Times.