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  • Attorney General files suit against Chino Valley Unified to stop ‘forced outing policy’

    Attorney General files suit against Chino Valley Unified to stop ‘forced outing policy’


    Attorney General Rob Bonta

    Credit: Office of the Attorney General

    California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit today against Chino Valley Unified asking the San Bernardino County Superior Court to end a district policy that requires school staff to tell parents if their child asks to be identified by a different gender or name, or accesses a bathroom or program that don’t align with the gender on their official records.

    The lawsuit also asks the court to issue a preliminary injunction to halt the district policy immediately to protect the safety of transgender and gender-nonconforming students in the school district while the court case proceeds.

    “In its function, in its text, and in its context this policy is disruptive,” Bonta said at a news conference Monday morning. “It’s discriminatory, and it’s downright dangerous. It has no place in California, which is why we have moved in court to strike it down.”

    The Attorney General’s Office filed the case after completing a civil rights investigation of the district. The investigation found that the policy, passed on July 21, discriminates against transgender and gender-nonconforming students, violates their constitutional and civil rights, and threatens their mental, emotional and physical well-being, Bonta said.

    “Let’s call this policy what it is. It’s a forced outing policy,” Bonta said. 

    The policy violates the constitutional right of all California students to be treated equally, regardless of their gender, gender identity, or gender expression, Bonta said. It violates California’s equal protection clause, and it violates California’s constitutionally protected right to privacy, he said.

    Transcripts and recordings of the Chino Valley Unified board meetings reveal that trustees were motivated by a desire to harbor animosity, discrimination and prejudice, Bonta said.

    “Transgender and gender-nonconforming students were described as suffering from a mental illness and perversion,” Bonta said. “There were claims that policies protecting these students are a threat to the integrity of our nation and the family system as we know it. One board member even went as far as to publicly state that transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals need non-affirming action from their parents to get better.”

    Chino Valley Unified officials weren’t notified that the lawsuit was filed until after media outlets began to report on it Monday morning, said Andrea Johnston, district spokeswoman, in an email.

    Johnston did not provide a district official for an interview with EdSource, saying district officials were still reviewing the lawsuit with attorneys. But, Johnston did dispute Bonta’s allegation that the policy puts transgender students at risk.

    “The district’s policy does protect transgender students by requiring staff to notify CPS/law enforcement if the student believes they are in danger or have been abused, injured, or neglected due to their parent or guardian knowing of their preferred gender identity. In these circumstances, CVUSD staff will not notify parents or guardians, but rather, wait for the appropriate agencies to complete their investigations regarding the concerns shared by the student.”

    Johnston said that the district has been transparent in its dealings with the Attorney General’s office on the matter, providing it with all the requested documents and records.

    “Superintendent (Norm) Enfield spoke with the DOJ’s legal counsel weekly to confirm the district was providing requested files, which had changed several times from the original subpoena,” she wrote in the email.

    Students who submitted declarations for the lawsuit said the board policy has made them fear for their safety and has caused them to become withdrawn in school.

    “It presents students with a terrible choice, either walk back your rights to gender identity and gender expression, to be yourself, to be who you are, or face the risk of serious harm, mental harm, emotional harm, physical harm,” Bonta said of the policy. 

    Temecula Valley Unified, Anderson Union High School District and Murrieta Valley Unified also have passed parent notification policies, but aren’t included in the complaint. If the state wins its case, districts with the exact same policy will also be prohibited from using it, Bonta said.

    “We are standing up for our children today, not allowing their rights to be trampled, not allowing them to be put in harm’s way by a school board who is not complying with California law,” Bonta said.

     





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  • Cal State extends general education requirements for transfers to first-time freshmen

    Cal State extends general education requirements for transfers to first-time freshmen


    Students walking on CSU San Marcos campus.

    Anne Hall/CSU San Marcos

    New general education requirements created for transfer students will now apply to all students, including first-time freshmen in the California State University. 

    Cal State trustees voted Wednesday to create a unified, simplified general education pathway for all students, despite opposition from faculty and students that the decision would eliminate classes that contribute to lifelong learning. 

    The decision effectively replaces the “CSU GE Breadth” and reduces the number of general education required credits from 39 to 34, by eliminating additional humanities and arts courses and classes identified as lifelong learning and self-development. However, it also adds a laboratory class to the requirements. Students would still be able to take many of these courses as electives. 

    The simplified pathway, known as Cal-GETC or the California General Education Transfer Curriculum, was first proposed in May 2022 as part of the Student Transfer Achievement Reform Act of 2021 as a way to improve the transfer experience for community college students entering the University of California and Cal State systems. The curriculum was developed by the academic senates of the CSU, the UC and the community colleges and goes into effect in the fall of 2025. 

    Although the new transfer pathway was created with community college students in mind, Cal State administrators and trustees chose to apply it to first-time freshmen, too.

    About 60% of Cal State’s first-year applicants have some type of transfer credit, many of them earned through dual enrollment courses taken in high school, said April Grommo, CSU’s vice chancellor for enrollment management, adding that some continuing CSU students also complete general education courses through their local community colleges. Without creating one pathway, Grommo said about 25% of undergraduates would have to complete more general education requirements. 

    “Aligning general education for all CSU students provides an equitable set of degree requirements for all undergraduate students,” she said. 

    Trustees said proceeding with two different systems could lead to equity concerns. 

    “I am concerned that if we have one path for community college transfers and one path for those students who begin with us, that there might be a feeling of inequity,” trustee Jack Clarke Jr., said. 

    Although most Cal State faculty support the new simplified path for transfer students, many said they opposed applying it to students who enter the system as freshmen. 

    Beth Steffel, chair of CSU’s academic senate, said despite claims that students can still take these courses, there is a chance that courses will be eliminated if not designated as part of general education. 

    “If a course is not required, it will not be offered,” Steffel said. “Resource constraints ensure this reality.” 

    Eliminating the courses from general education requirements could also have unintended consequences by reducing the potential for students to learn other languages through arts and humanities and create costs by adding an additional science laboratory, Steffel said.

    Steven Filling, an accounting professor at Stanislaus State, said losing the courses provided in CSU GE Breadth rquirements would be detrimental to students who enter the system as freshmen because they would miss out on the extra skills gained from social learning, communication and critical thinking. 

    For example, kinesiology classes, which is the study of movement, fall under the lifelong learning and self-development courses. Students interested in business fields like accounting, for example, could take golfing courses to prepare them for meeting with clients.

    “If you’ve never played golf and have no clue about it, well, you may have a little bit of trouble,” Filling said. 

    These classes are called “lifelong learning” because they help students discover how to cope and deal with the world around them, he said. 

    There’s another reason some CSU faculty oppose Cal-GETC: Much of the curriculum was chosen with the UC system in mind. 

    “The UC has a pretty strong position of, ‘Well, if we don’t agree to it, we’re not going to do it,’” Filling said. “If you look at Cal-GETC, you’ll notice a strange similarity between that and the UC’s present (general education) programming.” 

    Filling said one problem with that is the UC and Cal State systems have different missions and, although there is overlap, educate different types of students. For example, the UCs are tasked with admitting the top 9% of high school graduates.

    “To think that somebody in the top 5% of their high school class is going to be at exactly the same level as somebody who is at the 30th percentile is unrealistic,” he said.

    “It’s clear our students need different things than what UC students do,” he said. “It may be the case that the community colleges, with the resources they have, can provide the additional support those students need to get them up to the level where UC students are. It’s far from clear to me that that works for students coming into the CSU.” 

    The new simplified pathway represents both systems, said Laura Massa, Cal State’s interim vice chancellor for academic and faculty programs. For example, Cal-GETC includes ethnic studies and oral communication requirements that were required for CSU but not UC.

    Student trustee Diana Aguilar-Cruz said some of the opposition from students arises from their rising distrust of the board and administration’s decisions. Students have been calling for some analysis of the current general education path before making any change. 

    “Especially with all the prior decisions that we’ve been making throughout the year,” Aguilar-Cruz said, referring to the tuition increase. “They really need to see this data. … That has really fractured the trust that students have.” 

    However, trustees said they did not want to proceed with two different systems for meeting general education requirements.

    Despite opposition from faculty and students to the change, Cal State officials said they worked collaboratively with both groups on understanding the pros and cons and took both groups into consideration. 

    “Shared governance doesn’t always mean agreement,” CSU Chancellor Mildred Garcia said. “The success, sustainability and continued growth of our institution depends on our ability to recruit, serve and guide our students through our universities to remove barriers that sometimes we put in their way and provide clear and direct pathways to a degree and a fulfilling profession for us. And for me, I believe a single GE pattern for all CSU students achieves that goal, and it advances our mission of student success for all.” 





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  • Trump Goes After Two Critics, and His Attorney General Will Help His Vendetta

    Trump Goes After Two Critics, and His Attorney General Will Help His Vendetta


    Trump is following through on his frequent threats to punish anyone who crossed him in the past. He recently ordered his compliant Attorney General to investigate two men who were critical of him during his first term. Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, wrote about the tyrannical nature of this action and about Pam Bondi’s willingness to do whatever he wants.

    Honig writes at the website Cafe, a hub for legal experts:

    Donald Trump’s presidential payback tour rages on, and now it’s personal. It’s one thing to target multi-billion dollar law firms, universities, and media outlets for organizational retribution; those efforts, aimed at stifling and punishing any criticism or dissent, are reprehensible in their own right. But now Trump is going after individual private citizens, using the might of the Executive Branch to potentially throw his detractors in prison.

    In a pair of official proclamations – rendered no less unhinged by the use of official fonts and White House letterhead – Trump identifies two targets who worked in the federal government during his first tenure and dared to speak out publicly against him. First: Chris Krebs, who led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from 2018 to 2020 and made headlines when he publicly contradicted Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. For this act of heretical truth-telling, Trump labels Krebs “a significant bad-faith actor” – whatever the hell that means – who poses grave “risks” to the American public. 

    And then there’s Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security official who publicly criticized the President in an anonymous book and various media appearances. Taylor, like Krebs, purportedly poses “risks” to the United States, is a “bad-faith actor” (though apparently not a significant one like Krebs) and “stoked dissension” with his public commentary. 

    Are you scared? Don’t you fear the “risks” posed by these two monsters?

     True to the form he has displayed when going after disfavored law firms, Trump hits below the belt. The President orders security clearances stripped not only from Krebs and Taylor but also from everyone who works with them (Krebs at a private cybersecurity firm, Taylor at the University of Pennsylvania). He’s punishing his targets – plus their employers and colleagues, First Amendment freedom of association be darned. 

    It gets worse. In a separate set of orders, Trump directed the Attorney General to open criminal investigations of Krebs and Taylor. Notably absent from the orders is any plausible notion that either might have committed a federal crime. This hardly needs to be said, but it’s not a federal crime to be a “bad-faith actor,” to “stoke dissension,” or even to be a “wise guy,” as Trump called Krebs from the Oval Office.

    The next move is Pam Bondi’s – and we know how this will go. 

    Any reasonable, ethical attorney general would follow the bedrock principle that a prosecutor must have “predication” – some kernel of fact on which to believe a crime might have been committed – to open a criminal investigation. The bar is low, but it serves the vital purpose of preventing precisely the baseless retributive inquests that Trump has now ordered up. In observance of this foundational precept, even Bill Barr – the subject of sharp criticism in my first book, Hatchet Man – generally ignored Trump’s public pleas for the arrests of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and others. Like the exhausted parent of an unruly toddler, Barr would mostly sit back and let the tantrum pass. 

    Don’t count on Bondi taking the same course of passive resistance to the President. She has already shown her true colors, and they’re whatever shade Trump pleases. For example, despite the distinct possibility of criminality by top administration officials around the Signal scandal, the AG refused even to investigate. Instead, she decreed – after zero inquiry, with zero evidence – that information about military attack plans was somehow not classified, and that nobody had acted recklessly. Case closed, no inquiry needed. 

    Bondi no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. She’s in the bag for Trump. The question now is whether she’ll cross the line that even Barr, her crooked predecessor, would not, and use the Justice Department’s staggering investigative power as an offensive weapon. 

    Even if DOJ investigates but concludes it cannot bring a criminal charge, the threat to Krebs and Taylor is real. Any criminal inquiry takes an enormous toll on its subject; subpoenas fly, friends and colleagues get pulled into the grand jury, phones get seized and searched, legal costs mount, professional reputations suffer, personal ties fray. Ask anyone who has been investigated by the Justice Department but not indicted. They’ll tell you it’s a nightmare. 

    If Bondi does somehow convince a grand jury to indict somebody for something, Trump has unwittingly handed both Krebs and Taylor a potent defense: selective prosecution, which applies where an individual has been singled out for improper purposes. Exhibit A (for the defense): Trump’s own grand proclamations, which openly confess to his personal and political motives for ordering a Justice Department inquiry. Selective prosecution defenses rarely succeed, often because prosecutors typically don’t commit their improper motives to paper. But this would be the rare case where the evidence is so plain – it’s on White House letterhead, signed by the President – that a judge could hardly overlook it.

    Trump has long made a habit of threatening his opponents with criminal prosecution through social media posts and by spontaneous outbursts from the lectern. Until now, it was mostly bluster, a public form of scream therapy for the capricious commander-in-chief. But now it’s in writing, from the president to the attorney general, who typically jumps to attention to serve whatever suits the boss, prosecutorial standards be darned. Trump’s dark fantasies are coming to life. 

    Elie Honig served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for 8.5 years and as the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice at the Office of Attorney General for the State of New Jersey for 5.5 years. He is currently a legal Analyst for CNN and Executive Director at Rutgers Institute for Secure Communities



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