School district agrees to opt-outs for LGBT lessons after Christian families’ lawsuit
A public school district in Southern California has agreed to notify parents when lessons include LGBT-related material and allow them to opt their children out, settling a lawsuit brought by two Christian families after a book was read to their sons without their prior knowledge.
The Encinitas Union School District reached the settlement with the families, and a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California approved the agreement and dismissed the case last week. The National Center for Law & Policy, which represented the families, said the court’s approval was required because minors were among the plaintiffs.
The district agreed to pay the two families $175,000.
NCLP and First Liberty Institute, another legal group, represented the plaintiffs.
The settlement followed a policy change the district made in November 2025, when it dropped an appeal of an earlier court order and began giving families advance notice and opt-out rights for gender identity material in its student mentoring program.
A federal judge’s 2025 opinion in the lawsuit brought by the families over an incident at La Costa Heights Elementary School described the book My Shadow Is Pink as being about a boy who likes girls’ clothing and toys and feels out of place with his family and friends, so his shadow ends up pink instead of the usual blue.
The father in the story initially struggles with his son’s difference but eventually accepts the boy’s pink shadow as part of his “inner-most self,” the judge wrote at the time. The older students then watched a recorded reading of the book with their kindergarten partners, before being told to ask the younger children the color of their own shadow and trace their outlines on the ground in that color with chalk.
Carlos and Jenny Encinas, whose son attended the school, asked the district to notify parents in advance and give them the choice to keep their children out of similar lessons going forward. The district said no and resolved to continue teaching the lessons without notifying parents or offering an opt-out.
Once Carlos voiced his objections, district staff and other parents grew hostile toward his family, and the school’s parent-teacher association organized a day when about half the school wore pink to show support for trans ideology. The family said they received threats over the phone and face to face, and that harassment at school pushed their sons to switch schools.
The Encinas family and another local family sued the district in federal court on Sept. 10, 2024. The plaintiffs later sought a preliminary injunction.
Judge M. James Lorenz, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, granted the injunction in part on May 12, 2025. He found the district had probably broken the First Amendment when it compelled the boys' speech, forcing them to take part in and express gender-identity messages that conflicted with their Christian faith.
California law excuses students from health instruction that conflicts with a family’s religious beliefs, upon written parental request. The school applied that policy to lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in health classes. The plaintiffs argued it failed to apply the same standard to the buddy program reading.
On June 27, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause means public schools must give parents notice and a chance to excuse their children from instruction, including LGBT material that substantially undermines the religion they're teaching at home, NCLP noted.
Jenny Encinas and her son Shea spoke at a hearing of the U.S. Department of Justice Religious Liberty Commission earlier this month. President Donald Trump introduced Shea at the hearing, and the pair said school staff and other students confronted and mistreated them after they objected to the lessons.
