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Dive Brief:
Maryland’s Montgomery County Board of Education must comply with court-enforced parental right protections and pay $1.5 million in damages to a group of parents who sought to opt their children out of LGBTQ+-friendly curriculum on religious grounds under a settlement ending a yearslong legal battle.
The settlement and permanent injunction in Mahmoud v. Taylor requires the board to notify parents before using instructional materials related to family life and human sexuality and to allow parents to opt their children out of those lessons. The district will be placed under ongoing court jurisdiction to ensure compliance, according to Becket, a religious liberty law firm that brought the case on behalf of parents.
While the permanent injunction applies only to Montgomery County Public Schools, the case resulted in a Supreme Court decision last year against the district and set the tone for many other school systems nationwide that are walking the line between creating an inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ students and protecting students’ and parents’ religious expression under the First Amendment.
Dive Insight:
Opt-outs are a longstanding practice in education. However, it is one that has varied by district and state. Some state laws allowing the practice do so specifically for sex education, while other laws are even narrower.
But the list of subjects that have come under scrutiny by parents have sought to opt their children out of has expanded in recent years as debates over critical race theory, gender and sexuality, and even social-emotional learning have divided communities and states.
Mahmoud v. Taylor was one of the first high-profile cases on the matter to reach the Supreme Court after a wave of parental rights laws restricting LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and race-related materials that were considered “divisive” swept through the nation’s Republican-leaning states and localities. It also highlighted how culture wars were reaching districts in blue states, as Montgomery County is located in a Democrat-leaning state without a “Don’t Say Gay” law.
While such laws restrict students’ access en masse, the group of parents in Montgomery County sued the district to opt their individual children out of a curriculum that was still broadly available to others, and which they found contrary to their religious beliefs.
The parents filed the lawsuit in 2023, after the district — Maryland’s largest — rolled out a pre-K-5 English language arts curriculum that included LGBTQ+-inclusive books.
While the school board had originally offered parents an opt-out from that curriculum, it walked back that policy after “individual schools could not accommodate the growing number of opt-out requests without causing significant disruptions to the classroom environment.” The opt-outs created what the board called “unworkable burdens” for educators, according to court documents.
In response, the parents claimed that their inability to opt their children out violated their First and 14th Amendment rights, including their right to determine the religious upbringing of their children. The Supreme Court ruled against the district last year, remanding the case to the lower courts for further proceedings.
“Public schools nationwide are on notice: running roughshod over parental rights and religious freedom isn’t just illegal — it’s costly,” said Eric Baxter, senior counsel at Becket and lead attorney for the parents, in a Feb. 20 statement. “This settlement enforces the Supreme Court’s ruling and ensures parents, not government bureaucrats, have the final say in how their children are raised.”
Baxter added that the parents’ victory “reshaped the law.”
The Montgomery County Board of Education did not respond to K-12 Dive’s request for comment.
Though the injunction doesn’t apply to other districts, the Supreme Court case tied to it has led districts to revisit their own opt-out policies during a time of heightened disagreements over curricula, especially related to LGBTQ+ and race issues.
Although the Supreme Court didn’t lay out a framework for districts to work with, it did provide districts with guardrails to consider when crafting such policies, including those around age and subject.
The majority opinion, for example, says that educational requirements targeted toward very young children may be analyzed differently from educational requirements for high school students.
It also restricted curriculum that “substantially interferes” with children’s religious development, a threshold that districts will have to contend with when setting opt-out policies.
Such details may be cleared up through later cases that make it to the Supreme Court, education legal experts said following the decision in Mahmoud. In the meantime, districts are left to fill in the blanks.
