HELENA – Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen led a 19-state coalition that filed a brief in support of parental rights and against “social transitioning” of children in a lawsuit against a policy at a Massachusetts school district that is stripping parents of their longstanding and fundamental right to direct the upbringing and care of their children.

The case, Foote v. Ludlow School Committee, involves Ludlow Public School in Massachusetts and parents Stephen Foote and Marissa Silvestri. The school secretly promoted “social transitioning”— actively subverting the parents’ requests for school personnel to stay out of their family matter and calling their two children by new names and pronouns. It went as far as a school counselor having secret discussions with the students and suggesting that they weren’t safe with their parents.

The brief asks the First Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse the district court’s decision.

“When a student considers transitioning gender, parents have a fundamental, constitutional right to be involved in that decision-making process. Yet school districts across the country, strong-armed by ideologically driven advocacy groups, have shut parents out of the process and trampled on their fundamental rights,” Knudsen wrote in the brief. “This Court should therefore reverse or, at a minimum, remand for new analysis.”

School officials publicly maligned the parents’ assertion of their rights and concern for their children’s well-being as “thinly-veiled intolerance.” Even though the district court rejected Foote and Silvestri’s claims, it agreed that “it is disconcerting that school administrators or a school committee adopted and implemented a policy requiring school staff to actively hide information from parents about something of importance regarding their child.”

Knudsen also noted in the brief that Ludlow presumably does not treat a child’s depression or other mental health issues without involving parents, and it has no duty or right to keep parents in the dark about gender-related distress either.

Attorneys general from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia joined Attorney General Knudsen in filing the brief.

Click here to read the brief filed Monday.

Attorney General Knudsen is active in the fight for parental rights. In November, he filed a similar amicus brief with 18 states supporting parental rights in a lawsuit against an Iowa school district’s policy stripping parents of their right to direct the upbringing and care of their children. Last year he joined a 14-state effort to force President Joe Biden and his administration to turn over records related to the administration’s schemes to prevent parents from speaking out against leftist indoctrination in public schools. He also led a 17-state coalition against a Biden administration rule that infringes on parental rights and conflicts with the text, purpose, and longstanding interpretation of Title IX.