Michigan Ed Department wants to disregard parents’ rights, board member says

A member of the Michigan State Board of Education claims that the Michigan Department of Education wants to hide a plan for schools to teach students about gender identity and sexual orientation, contrary to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that mandates parental consent.

The nation’s high court issued an interim ruling that left in place a district court injunction of a California law that parents said required schoolteachers not to tell parents if their children pursued a different gender identity while at school.

The interim ruling in the lawsuit Mirabelli v. Bonta, issued March 2, said California’s ”policies likely violate parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

While the lawsuit is about California law, the question of whether teachers can or should tell parents about gender transitions has arisen in Michigan as well. In 2022 the Michigan Department of Education released a training video that encouraged teachers to conceal at-school gender transitions from parents, Nikki Snyder, a member of the Michigan State Board of Education, recently told Michigan Capitol Confidential in an email.

Snyder shared a clip from the video with CapCon. The video is no longer available on the department’s website.

In the session, meant to be shown to teachers, a training official said that schools do not have a legal obligation to tell parents about a student’s gender identity and preferred pronouns.

The trainer then coached teachers on how to talk with parents without revealing their students’ preferred name and pronoun choice.

The headline of a September 2022 Bridge Michigan report said that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ”blasted” the video, along with her Republican challenger.

The story itself offered no direct quotation from Whitmer, though it did quote from a letter one of her aides, Tricia Foster, wrote to Michael Rice, then the state superintendent. ”Foster told Rice the training video ’went outside of that scope’ in terms of parent perspectives,” Bridge Michigan wrote.

It noted that Tricia Foster, Whitmer’s chief operating officer, sent a letter to Michael Rice, then the state superintendent of public instruction. The department said that claims that the video encouraged teachers to keep transitions secret from parents were ”patently false and deliberately divisive,” the publication added.

Michigan Capitol Confidential reported in November 2025 that the state’s new sex education curriculum would be woven throughout course materials so it would be difficult for parents to know when to opt their children out.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Feb. 18 that it was investigating three Michigan school districts: the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the Lansing School District and Gofrey-Lee Public Schools. The department said it would ”determine whether they have included sexual orientation and gender ideology” and ”whether the schools have notified parents of their right to opt their children out of such instruction.”

Snyder, the state board member, claimed in a text message to CapCon that the state education department is intentionally misleading the public.

Snyder added that schools cannot teach gender identity, which the board directed local school districts to do with health education guidelines. The guidelines, she said, do not call for teaching reproductive anatomy, which would trigger a state mandate for parental consent.

“So they claim that you can opt out of the curriculum underneath the sex education statute, but you cannot opt out of the health education they’ve now directed local districts to teach through gender identity.”

Parents cannot opt their children out of health education, Snyder said, because it is a graduation requirement.

The new state superintendent, Glenn Maleyko, issued a statement on Feb. 19 to address the federal investigation.

“The Michigan Department of Education strongly supports all students and supports the school districts that have been targeted by the U.S Department of Justice,” said Maleyko. Children need to feel included if they are to learn, he added.

Districts have local control and parents retain the right to decide whether their children participate in sex education instruction, Maleyko said.