Parents Sue After CA School District Taught Pride Parade Lessons and Denied Their Opt-Out
CA Parents Sue Sunnyvale School District 09-16-26
A Latter-day Saint couple says a Silicon Valley school district promised to honor their religious opt-out rights, then reversed course and declared that the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor simply does not apply in California.
Last year the Supreme Court settled a question California school districts had been dodging for years. Can a public school force a child to sit through instruction on gender and sexuality that conflicts with the family’s faith, without notice and without any way to opt out? In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court said no. Parents have a constitutional right to know when that instruction is coming and to pull their children out of it.
The Sunnyvale School District has decided that ruling does not apply to Sunnyvale.
Justin and Rose Taylor are devout members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with two children at Cumberland Elementary School, a son entering third grade and a daughter entering first. Right after Mahmoud came down, they asked the district for exactly what the Supreme Court had just guaranteed them: advance notice before their children were taught with LGBTQ+-inclusive storybooks or similar material, and the chance to excuse their kids from those lessons.
Other districts complied fast. The California Department of Education issued guidance within weeks confirming that schools may need to notify parents and let them opt out of instruction that undermines a family’s faith, and Riverside Unified built a working opt-out system almost immediately. Sunnyvale’s board, meanwhile, adopted a resolution that same month acknowledging “legal opt-out provisions may exist,” while committing teachers to resist any pressure to “erase or diminish LGBTQIA content” from the classroom. The Taylors soon learned what that commitment meant for their own family.
At first, Sunnyvale played along. In October, the district sent an opt-out form that explicitly listed religious objection as valid grounds to excuse a child from instruction. By November, Cumberland’s principal had told librarians not to check out LGBTQ+ books to the Taylor children at all. For months the family waited, told only that the district’s “opt out process is not functional for Mahmoud v. Taylor yet.”
Then, this past February, Sunnyvale reversed course completely. In a letter from Paul Slayton, the district’s Director of Student Support Services, Sunnyvale told the Taylors its LGBTQ+ curriculum “is not optional and is not subject to parent opt-out provisions.” The ruling, the district insisted, involved a different set of facts in a different state and created no right for California parents at all.
What Sunnyvale Is Actually Teaching
This curriculum is no footnote. Sunnyvale follows teaching guidance from the Santa Clara County Office of Education that threads LGBTQ+ instruction through nearly every subject, at every grade level. Health lessons are told to swap “women” for “ovaries” when teaching reproduction. A sample fourth-grade history lesson covers “Two Spirit and Non-Traditional Families,” built, in the county’s own words, to disrupt traditional definitions of the family. Even math lessons are told to build word problems around gender-neutral bathrooms and same-sex marriage.
Cumberland’s reading lists include several of the same storybooks the Supreme Court reviewed in Mahmoud. Pride Puppy sends three- and four-year-olds hunting for pride-parade imagery, including drag performers and a well-known LGBTQ activist who was also a sex worker. Prince & Knight retells a fairy tale as a same-sex romance, complete with a wedding and a cheering kingdom. The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish rewrites a preschool sing-along into a celebration of drag, written by an author who has said he hopes children reading it grow up to become drag queens themselves.
As their Church teaches, the Taylors believe God created every person male or female and that parents carry a sacred duty to raise their children accordingly. Sunnyvale built a curriculum to teach the opposite to children barely out of kindergarten, then refused to let their own parents opt them out of it.
The Lawsuit
On June 22, the Taylors filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the Religious Liberty Clinic at Pepperdine’s Caruso School of Law. Taylor v. Sunnyvale School District names the district, Superintendent Gudiel Crosthwaite, all five elected board members, Slayton, and Cumberland’s interim principal.
The complaint brings five claims under the First and Fourteenth Amendments: two under the Free Exercise Clause built on Mahmoud, one for lack of religious neutrality, one for viewpoint discrimination under the Free Speech Clause, and one under the Due Process Clause’s protection of a parent’s right to direct a child’s upbringing. The Taylors want an injunction ordering notice and opt-outs going forward, plus damages and attorney’s fees.
“Our children are the most cherished part of our lives,” the Taylors said, adding that they, not a school district, should decide when and how their kids learn about sexuality and gender. Becket attorney Michael O’Brien made the legal point just as plainly: the Constitution does not stop working at the California border, and no district gets to decide for itself that a Supreme Court ruling only applies somewhere else. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board took notice of the case in July, calling it a direct test of whether districts can sidestep Mahmoud by insisting it happened in another state.
Why This Is Every California Parent’s Fight
Sunnyvale is not acting alone, and the Taylors will not be the last family this happens to. Mahmoud, Mirabelli v. Bonta, and the Ninth Circuit’s ruling against AB 1955 all affirm the same thing: parents, not the state, hold the God-given authority to raise their own children. Yet district after district treats those rulings as suggestions, betting most families will never push back.
Greg Burt, CFC’s Vice President, said Sunnyvale’s defiance is exactly why parents cannot afford to sit this fight out.
“Sunnyvale wasn’t confused about what the Supreme Court said. Its own board admitted in writing that opt-out rights might exist, then committed itself in that same resolution to resisting any pressure to pull back on the ideology driving this curriculum. Then the district turned around and told a faithful family, to their face, that the Constitution doesn’t count in California. Scripture tells parents to teach their children diligently, not hand that duty to a school board that has already decided which values it intends to win. The Taylors refused to hand it over, and every parent in this state should be grateful they did.”
What You Can Do Right Now
You do not need a lawsuit to protect your own children. California parents already have the right the Taylors are fighting for in federal court. For the full scope of what you can opt out of, from LGBTQ+ storybooks to CRT lessons to invasive surveys, see CFC’s guide: From CRT to Gender Ideology, Parents Now Have Opt-Out Rights. Here’s How to Use Them.
Rights that sit unused tend to disappear. Sunnyvale is betting most parents will never ask. Don’t prove them right.