When “Providing Information” Replaces Parents: How Washington Law Is Driving a Wedge Between Families and Schools

by: Jessie Simmons

Category: Education/Child Welfare

This debate is often dismissed as culture-war hysteria. It isn’t. It’s a normative question grounded in real policy choices Washington has made, not a conspiracy theory. And it’s reasonable to be uneasy about the direction of travel, even if one fully supports protecting vulnerable kids in extreme circumstances. The issue isn’t whether children should be protected from abuse. Everyone agrees on that. The issue is whether Washington has quietly shifted from parental primacy with narrow exceptions to a system where institutions routinely decide when parents are optional.

Over time, Washington has moved parts of child-welfare, education, and medical law away from the presumption that parents are the default decision-makers and toward a framework that treats children as independent rights-holders earlier than most people intuitively expect. That shift did not begin with gender policy. It grew out of decades-old public-health logic aimed at suicide prevention, abuse situations, and access to care for adolescents who might otherwise avoid treatment. But as those exceptions expanded, they began to intersect with schools, identity issues, and discretionary institutional judgment in ways lawmakers did not fully anticipate.

Under Washington law, minors can consent to certain medical and mental-health services without parental notification or consent once they reach age 13. This includes outpatient mental-health counseling and, in some contexts, gender-related care. At the same time, schools operate under FERPA and state-level guidance that allows them to withhold certain information from parents if disclosure is believed to risk harm to the student. That is not a judicial standard. It is a discretionary one, exercised internally by school staff. More recent legislation has also expanded circumstances in which schools and youth-serving entities may delay or avoid notifying parents when a minor is believed to be at risk, particularly in situations involving alleged abuse, neglect, or identity-based conflict. Supporters describe this as a safety buffer. Critics see it as state-sanctioned secrecy.

None of this is hypothetical. It is real law and real policy.

Lawmakers justify this framework by pointing to edge cases. They argue, not unreasonably, that there are situations where parents are abusive, coercive, or dangerous, and that mandatory immediate parental notification could expose a child to harm. They cite physical abuse, forced conversion therapy, and acute mental-health crises. In that framing, schools and counselors act as a temporary protective buffer until professionals can assess risk. That logic made sense when applied narrowly. The problem is policy drift.

What began as limited exceptions for extreme cases has, in practice, become a broad discretionary regime. Decisions that once required court involvement or child-protective services are now often made internally by counselors, teachers, or administrators, without an adversarial process and without a requirement to involve parents unless and until the system decides it is appropriate. Washington policy increasingly flips the traditional presumption. Instead of assuming parents act in their child’s best interest unless proven otherwise, the system treats parents as a potential threat first and a partner only conditionally.

That creates predictable consequences. There is no due process for families excluded based on subjective assessments. There is role confusion, as educators and counselors—who are not neutral adjudicators—bring their own training, beliefs, and biases into deeply personal situations. And there is erosion of trust. When parents discover secret communications or withheld information, the damage is often irreversible. Families do not just pull their kids from schools. They uproot their lives.

This is where the phrase “we were providing information” becomes so important. That language is not accidental. It is institutional risk management. Providing information is framed as passive and neutral. The school claims it did not diagnose, direct, refer, or facilitate care. But in the real world, information is not neutral. If a school introduces a specific diagnostic framework, curates materials, presents access pathways, and does so privately with a child while withholding that interaction from parents, “providing information” functions as guidance. Legally defensible, perhaps. Legitimate in the eyes of parents, often not.

The Olympia and Puyallup stories illustrate this wedge in different ways. The Olympia School District controversy involving secret teacher-student communications resonated not because everyone agreed on every underlying fact, but because it crossed a bright line for many families. A teacher instructing a child to conceal communications from parents is not a minor procedural dispute. The district’s limited public engagement, citing privacy, only reinforced suspicion that institutions now answer to policy first and families second.

The Puyallup case is more complex and remains unresolved, but it follows a familiar pattern. According to the mother’s account, the family disclosed mental-health concerns and had a safety plan in place. Gender identity was not raised by the parents. The school allegedly introduced gender-dysphoria materials under the justification of “providing information,” without parental consent or notification. CPS was reportedly contacted, investigated, and found abuse allegations unfounded. Institutional silence followed. At this stage, these are allegations grounded primarily in family testimony and opinion-based reporting, not a complete set of publicly released records. That matters. But it also matters that Washington’s legal framework makes this sequence plausible even if no laws were technically broken.

That is the uncomfortable truth at the center of this debate. The system does not need to be corrupt to produce outcomes that feel unjust. It only needs broad discretion, limited transparency, and a presumption that parental involvement is a risk rather than a baseline.

There has been no real reckoning in part because this issue sits at the intersection of three highly protected institutional interests: education systems, public-health frameworks, and progressive social policy. Questioning the scope of these policies is often framed as hostility toward vulnerable children rather than a legitimate dispute over governance and authority. That framing shuts down honest debate and leaves families feeling unheard.

The bottom line is simple. It is reasonable to have narrow, emergency exceptions where the state intervenes to protect a child from demonstrable harm. It is not reasonable to build an education system where parents are structurally sidelined, information is withheld by default, and non-judicial actors exercise quasi-custodial power over children. A system that assumes parents are the problem will eventually treat all parents as suspect.

That is why this issue keeps escalating. And that is why people across the political spectrum, including many who support LGBTQ protections, are beginning to push back. This isn’t hysteria. It’s a legitimate governance question, and Washington can no longer avoid answering it.