Supreme Court declines to hear case involving Wellington GSA club

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case from parents against Colorado’s Poudre School District.
Parents claimed the district violated their rights by encouraging students to transition gender without their knowledge.
Lower courts had previously dismissed the case, ruling parents do not have a constitutional right to control school activities.
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving a claim that Poudre School District violated parents’ fundamental rights by encouraging students to transition to a new gender.
The court’s Oct. 14 decision leaves intact rulings by a U.S. District Court and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals that rejected the claims made by Jonathan Lee, Erin Lee, Nicholas Jurich and Linnea Jurich, effectively ending more than four years of legal challenges.
The Lees contend their daughter, then 12 years old, was urged to transition during a meeting of an afterschool club on May 4, 2021, at Wellington Middle School. The Juriches claimed their child, a sixth-grade classmate of the Lees’ daughter, had similar experiences at subsequent meetings of the same club, the school’s Gender and Sexualities Alliance.
Among their claims against the school district were policies that allowed the club’s sponsor, a teacher at the school, to withhold information from students’ families about their children’s gender identity. The Lees and Juriches argued those policies violated their parental rights under the 14th Amendment’s due-process clause.
The U.S. District Court rejected that claim while dismissing their case Dec. 19, 2023. Citing numerous previous rulings by state and federal courts, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, Judge Nina Y. Wang wrote that parents have the right to send their children to public or private school or educate them at home, but “parents have no constitutional right to exercise control over a school’s curriculum or extracurricular activities or to demand information about the same.”
Yang’s ruling went on to acknowledge that the parents generally have a fundamental right under the 14th Amendment to direct the upbringing of their children. The parent plaintiffs, she wrote, “have not adequately alleged a violation of that fundamental right.”
The Lees and Juriches then amended their complaint, dropping their minor children as defendants, removing the Poudre School District Board of Education as a defendant and eliminating their claims for injunctive relief. The amended complaint listed just one defendant, Poudre School District, and only sought monetary damages for violating their parental rights under the 14th Amendment.
The amended claim was denied as “futile” by the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado on May 16, 2024, noting that the parents failed to “plausibly allege municipal liability against the district,” according to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ April 22, 2025, decision to uphold that ruling.
That prompted the appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case Oct. 14 “because petitioners do not challenge the ground for the ruling” made by U.S. District Court and 10th Circuit of Appeals, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a brief statement that Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch joined.
“But I remain concerned that some federal courts are “tempt[ed]” to avoid confronting a “particularly contentious constitutional questio[n]”: whether a school district violates parents’ fundamental rights “when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process,” Alito wrote, quoting portions of his own dissenting opinion in the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a Dec. 9, 2024, case filed by parents against the Eau Claire Area School District in Wisconsin.