Amicus Brief: Rocklin Unified School District v. Public Employment Relations Board

In 2023, Rocklin Unified School District’s Board of Trustees adopted regulations requiring parents to be notified when their children request gender-related accommodations at school, including the use of a different name, pronouns, gender identity, or bathroom access. In response, the teachers’ union, the Rocklin Teachers Professional Association, brought an unfair-practice charge before California’s Public Employment Relations Board, alleging that the district failed to bargain before adopting the policy. PERB sided with the union and ordered the policy rescinded. The California Court of Appeal and California Supreme Court declined to review PERB’s decision, leaving the Supreme Court as the only remaining path to relief.

Social transition is an active psychological intervention, one that may reinforce otherwise temporary gender distress and put children on a path toward unnecessary medicalization. A school-board policy requiring parental notice for consequential decisions affecting a child’s mental health goes to the core of the parent-school relationship and safeguards parents’ constitutional rights to direct the upbringing, health, and education of their children.

PERB’s decision gives California teachers’ unions an effective veto over policies adopted by elected boards to protect parental rights. Teachers’ unions are already among the most powerful political actors in public education. They spend heavily and endorse candidates who sit across the bargaining table and decide school policy. But if they cannot get their way through the ordinary democratic process, PERB’s decision allows them to recast their objection as a labor dispute and seek administrative invalidation.

That theory has no inherent limiting principle. Many school-board policies require teachers to act in some way. If teacher implementation is enough to make a parental notification policy subject to union bargaining, then school boards govern only with union permission. The Court should grant certiorari to prevent public-sector labor law from becoming a vehicle for union control over core matters of school governance.

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of Constitutional Studies at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

John Ketcham is a legal policy fellow and director of Cities at the Manhattan Institute.