The Trump administration stepped on the gas pedal in its pursuit of alleged student privacy law violations this week, with the U.S. departments of Justice and Education announcing back-to-back legal actions against school districts.
The administration is invoking the 1978 Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment — along with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act — in its push for parental rights and crackdown on LGBTQ+-inclusive district policies and practices.
The PPRA gives parents — and students once they turn 18 — the right to review instructional materials and surveys. It also states that "no student shall be required" to submit a survey or evaluation related to sensitive information, including sexual behavior or attitudes and mental or psychological problems related to the student or their family.
"It generally functioned as a passive compliance requirement rather than the proactive enforcement tool this administration is making it," said Kayleigh Baker, an education law attorney and senior supervising consultant at TNG Consulting. "This level of publicized PPRA enforcement is unprecedented."
“Shocking reports from across the country indicate that our kids are being subjected to inappropriate material, surveys, and events in schools, and parents’ fundamental right to review such materials and opt their children out of these suggestive activities appear to be disregarded in the process," said Frank Miller, director of the Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office, in a July 28 statement.
“Parents must be the decision-makers in matters impacting the most intimate parts of their children’s lives. Parents — not school officials — know best when it comes to their children," Miller said.
Miller said his office will "thoroughly investigate these reports, and any similar reports, to protect parental rights and authority in education.”
The department launched two separate investigations under PPRA into Washington's Bethel School District and Colorado's Denver Public Schools on Tuesday. In a Tuesday announcement, the department cited allegations that a Bethel School District high school "exposed students to vials of testosterone" — a controlled substance that was eventually removed by local police after "being left unattended so close to minor students" — as part of a “Pride Month” display in June.
"These reports raise serious concerns, including whether Bethel School District teachers and school administrators encourage students to undergo medical procedures without parental consent," the department stated.
Bethel School District told K-12 Dive in an email that it "will cooperate in any way we can" with the federal investigation.
A district spokesperson said that in early June, district officials were made aware of a display at Graham-Kapowsin High School including "empty vials of testosterone as one of its visuals." "The display also contained some vials that still contained a small amount of unknown liquid," Douglas Boyles, the district spokesperson, said.
Boyles said the vials included in the display were unauthorized and didn't receive approval from school leadership or administration, and that administrators "immediately removed the vials and identified the individuals responsible for adding them without leadership approval," after which the district turned over the vials to the Pierce County Sheriff's Office.
The district is also reviewing "display oversight protocols," Boyles added.
In Denver, the Education Department is investigating allegations that a high school teacher “allegedly required students of the same sex to kiss each other in front of the classroom as part of a class assignment."
In both cases, the Education Department's student privacy office is investigating whether parents were notified and whether they were able to opt their children out of certain situations, such as the Denver incident it described as a "student evaluation."
"Parents are entitled by law to be notified if their children will be surveyed or evaluated on sensitive information about sex behaviors or attitudes," the department said.
Denver Public Schools said in an email to K-12 Dive that it had been notified of the Education Department's investigation.
Scot Pribble, a district spokesperson, said the district placed the teacher involved in the March 2025 incident on administrative leave "and completed a thorough investigation." There was also an independent review by a state administrative law judge and, combined with the district investigation, led the DPS Board of Education to unanimously terminate the employment of the teacher in May 2026.
FERPA violations also under microscope
The investigations into Denver and Bethel school districts come on the heels of a Monday announcement from the same Education Department office that it would take enforcement action under FERPA against Maryland's Anne Arundel County Public Schools and Michigan's Ann Arbor Public Schools over decisions to withhold information related to students' gender identities.
FERPA, also passed in the 1970s, is meant to protect the privacy of personally identifiable information in a student’s education record and give parents access to those records.
The FERPA enforcement action comes in partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, which entered into an interagency agreement with the Education Department in June to take on many of the Education Department's civil rights enforcement duties. One such duty involves enforcement of student privacy protections and parental access.
The Education Department under the second Trump administration has pushed PPRA and FERPA into the spotlight, as federal authorities are increasingly wielding the laws to crack down on districts over privacy policies on issues like students’ gender pronouns.
The department plans to amend regulations on the enforcement of both laws in the next two months, according to its 2026 Unified Agenda.
A final rule affecting the implementation of the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment is expected in August "to facilitate parents’ rights to notice and opt-out opportunities with regard to specified school information collections," the agenda says.
And in September, the department intends to amend FERPA regulations by "clarifying the definition of education record,” among other things.
FERPA and PPRA at the forefront
Last year, federal lawmakers resurfaced the two statutes in a House Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education Subcommittee hearing. The lawmakers were divided in the hearing over whether the laws — which were originally bipartisan — should be used to protect students' LGBTQ+ status from parents or to reveal it.
On one side were those who said student safety, place to live and rights are jeopardized by policies requiring parents to know students’ gender identities, sexual orientations, or pronoun and name changes.
On the other, lawmakers in favor of revealing students' LGBTQ+ information to parents say district policies leave families in the dark on important issues related to their children's mental health and upbringing.
In March 2025, the Education Department sent a Dear Colleague letter to educators saying FERPA and PPRA "were intended to shelter families from invasion of their privacy — not to insulate schools from transparency and accountability to parents."
"Schools should not treat parents as enemies just for wanting to know about the mental and physical health and safety of their own children," Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote in the letter.
Since then, the agency has launched and advanced a number of investigations into states and districts nationwide.
According to Parents Defending Education, a conservative parental rights group, over 1,200 districts representing more than 21,000 schools and 12.4 million students have policies stating that district personnel “can or should keep a student’s transgender status hidden from parents.”
According to the group's tally, last updated June 29, nearly half of those districts are in California, where a state law took effect this year preventing school employees from disclosing any information related to a student’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to anyone without their consent.
That law is currently being challenged in court, especially in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's emergency decision in March in Mirabelli v. Bonta. In that case, the justices sided with parents who had sued over California state policies that prevented schools from sharing students’ LGBTQ+ identities with their parents.
