The Leon County school system this week urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a high-profile appeal by a couple who allege their rights were violated after a child wanted to express a gender identity and use pronouns the parents didn’t support.
In a 38-page brief, the school system said the Supreme Court should deny a request by parents Jeffrey and January Littlejohn to take up the case. The Littlejohns filed a petition at the Supreme Court after a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them.
The legal fight stems from the 2020-2021 school year, when the Littlejohns’ child, a 13-year-old student at Leon County’s Deerlake Middle School, asked to go by a male name and use they and them pronouns, according to court documents. The child was identified as a girl at birth, and the Littlejohns did not allow the name and pronoun changes.
The child, identified by the initials A.G., told a school counselor about wanting to use the different name and the they and them pronouns, the documents said. Under a school system policy guide at the time, the parents were not immediately informed of the social transition at school. That ultimately led to the lawsuit and allegations that the parents’ rights had been violated.
The school system’s brief, filed Tuesday, said the school board in 2020 “lacked clear legislative guidance on how to balance concerns of safety, privacy, student rights and parental notice that arise when a student wants to deviate from their given name and pronouns.” But it said the Florida Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2021 approved a parental-rights law that addressed the issue.
The brief said the argument raised by the Littlejohns do not “warrant resolution by this (Supreme) Court in this case — or others. The issue of parental rights in this area is best resolved by the elected branches. Here, the state’s legislature has, after the facts at issue here, acted to provide clear direction to the school board moving forward.”
“The issues raised when a student desires to be called a different name and to use different pronouns in school can raise sensitive interests of privacy, safety, student rights and parental rights,” the brief, filed by attorney Mark Herron, said.
“School boards and officials do the best they can in balancing such interests, but they also benefit from clear legislative guidance. Legislatures and other elected officials can respond with greater nuance than courts can, and legislatures can quickly adapt as new information emerges or new views prevail.”
Also, the brief said the case stemmed from the meeting between the student and the counselor and what is known as a “student support plan” and that school officials subsequently resolved the dispute.
“The petition spins a tale of hostility to parental concerns,” the brief said.
“The complaint tells a different, more nuanced story. Although a school counselor initially met privately one time with the student and declined to disclose information about the student support plan, the higher-level school officials reversed course. They agreed that petitioners would attend any future meetings, gave them a copy of the student support plan, and ceased using any alternative name or pronouns. In short, petitioners are trying to make a constitutional case out of their initial exclusion from a single meeting. That is a losing constitutional claim under any potentially applicable standard.”
But in the petition, filed in September, attorneys for the Littlejohns argued that “parental-exclusion policies present one of the most important constitutional controversies in the nation.”
“They (school officials) labeled A.G. ‘nonbinary,’ required all teachers and staff to refer to her using they/them pronouns, updated internal records to reflect her ‘new’ name, asked her if she was ‘comfortable’ sharing bathrooms and bedrooms with males, and banned anyone from telling her parents,” the petition said. “They did all this without even asking A.G. if she wanted her parents to be involved. When the Littlejohns found out and asked the school to stop, the school refused.”
The Littlejohns have received backing in the case from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier and Republican leaders from more than 20 other states who joined together in an October brief.
“Parental rights are fundamental and foundational,” the brief filed by Uthmeier’s office said. “It is parents who are entrusted with ultimate responsibility for the care, formation, and well-being of their children. Recently, parental rights have taken on new focus as an ever-growing number of public-school officials are placing it upon themselves to make life-altering decisions for children in place of, or in direct conflict with, parents’ convictions.”
The Littlejohns filed the lawsuit against the Leon County School Board and school officials in 2021, but U.S. District Judge Mark Walker dismissed it. The three-judge panel of the appeals court, in a 2-1 decision in March, upheld Walker’s decision.
The panel ruling said the case involved a challenge to government executive actions and, as a result, the test under legal precedents was whether school officials’ actions “shocked the conscience.” It concluded the actions did not rise to that level and also said the school support plan was developed with the child in compliance with school board guidelines at the time.
“The child was not physically harmed, much less permanently so,” Judge Robin Rosenbaum wrote in the panel’s main opinion.
“Defendants did not remove the Littlejohns’ child from their custody. And defendants did not force the child to attend a student support plan meeting, to not invite the Littlejohns to that meeting, or to socially transition at school. In fact, defendants did not force the Littlejohns’ child to do anything at all. And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child. Under these circumstances, even if the Littlejohns felt that defendants’ efforts to help their child were misguided or wrong, the mere fact that the school officials acted contrary to the Littlejohns’ wishes does not mean that their conduct ‘shocks the conscience’ in a constitutional sense.”
