On November 3, 2026, Washington voters will decide Initiative Measure IL26-001, a proposal concerning parental rights over students in public schools. According to the official ballot description from the Washington Attorney General, the initiative would repeal changes the Legislature made to Washington’s parental-rights statute in 2025 and restore the law to the version originally enacted through Initiative 2081 in 2024.
Supporters frame IL26-001 as an effort to restore transparency between schools and parents. The initiative itself declares parents the “primary stakeholders” in their children’s upbringing and argues that access to student information promotes parental involvement. On its surface, this may sound like little more than a dispute over how much information schools should share with parents. In reality, IL26-001 would restore sweeping parental powers over student records, medical information, counseling records, and sensitive school activities while rolling back protections specifically designed to protect students whose parents are undergoing criminal proceedings for being abusive, or otherwise unsafe for their child.
When looking at this issue from the perspective of the students who would actually be affected and whose privacy is at stake, there is a major problem with building school policy around the assumption that giving a parent more information and control will always make a child safer. IL26-001 specifically repeals protections for abused youth regarding their school records, restoring the right of parents who are under criminal investigations for crimes against their child to access their child’s medical, disciplinary and school counseling records. It would also restore parental “opt-out” abilities to remove students from activities involving subjects such as sexuality, mental health, religion, political beliefs, and family values. For young people living with controlling or intolerant parents, these opt-outs can become a tool for informational isolation, allowing parents to extend the restrictions of the home into the classroom and cut students off from discussions, resources, and supportive environments that may help them understand their identity, recognize unhealthy family dynamics, or seek help.
Parents are not universally safe, supportive, or acting in their children’s best interests. Some children live with abusive parents. Others live with emotionally abusive or oppressive, intensely controlling parents who monitor their relationships, violate their basic privacy, isolate them from friends, punish them for their beliefs or identities, or deliberately prevent them from accessing mental-health care. Some LGBTQ+ youth live with parents who would punish, isolate, abuse, or attempt to change them if their identity became known. Some children are victims of parental medical neglect, where the very adult who legally controls their health care is refusing to obtain the treatment they need either from paranoia, or dangerous religious devotion.
For the students living in these dangerous home environments, privacy from a parent can be a matter of safety rather than secrecy. A school counselor, nurse, social worker, teacher, or other trusted adult may be one of the only people in a young person’s life they can safely talk to about what is happening at home. That is why IL26-001 deserves scrutiny not just as a “parents’ rights” proposal, but as a law that determines how much privacy and independent support students themselves are allowed to have.
This Initiative treats increased parental control as though it is automatically synonymous with student safety, even when the parent is the source of the student’s fear, abuse, isolation, medical neglect, or mental-health struggles. It places the rights of parents to know and control above the rights of young people to privacy, support, information, and meaningful access to trusted adults. When a law makes it easier for an abusive parent to learn what their child has told a counselor, easier for a controlling parent to restrict what their child can learn or discuss, and harder for vulnerable students to trust that school is a safe place to seek help, the people placed most at risk are the students who already have the fewest safe options.
NYRA strongly opposes Washington’s “Parental Rights” Initiative IL26-001, and we urge voters to vote against this initiative if they care about protecting the rights of vulnerable students from abusive and controlling parents who will only harm their lives. In the following article, we’ll explain in detail what this initiative would change, and exactly how it would harm youth in vulnerable situations.
Table of Contents
- What IL26-001 Would Actually Change
- How the Initiative will Harm Youth with Abusive Parents
- How this Initiative Harms Youth When Child Protective Services Fail them
- The Harms of Giving Parents Increased Access to Youth Mental Health and Medical Records
- How “Parental Opt-Out” Rights can Harm LGBTQ Teenagers and Youth in Controlling Home Environments
- How the Initiative Opposes Basic Student Rights
What IL26-001 Would Actually Change
To understand the initiative, it is important to understand its history. Washington enacted Initiative 2081 in 2024, creating what was called the “Parents’ Bill of Rights.” In 2025, the Legislature passed ESHB 1296, which kept many parental rights in place while changing several provisions involving student records, medical information, privacy, abuse investigations, nondiscrimination, and other protections. It also created a formal Statement of Student Rights and required school policies to prioritize student safety, access to education, freedom from discrimination, and privacy.
IL26-001 would now reverse the changes made to the parental-rights statute and restore the 2024 version. Its complete text specifically lists how it is reinstating Initiative 2081’s provisions focusing on parental involvement over instructional materials, student records, medical notification, and parental opt-outs. All of these aspects of parental involvement can be very harmful for youth living with abusive or oppressive parents who do not have their best interests at heart.
One of the most significant changes involves student records. Under the version IL26-001 would restore, parents could request their child’s “public school records” and generally receive a copy within 10 business days. The law expressly defines those records to include medical and health records, records of any mental-health counseling, vocational counseling records, disciplinary records, attendance records, special-education and disability-related records, and virtually any other student-specific files or documents maintained by the school.
The current 2025 law instead uses the more conventional concept of “education records,” ties access more directly to FERPA, and generally gives schools up to 45 days to fulfill a request. This distinction matters because the 2024 language explicitly singles out “records of any mental health counseling” as records parents are entitled to seek. When the original Initiative 2081 was implemented, Washington’s Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction reported that some of the most difficult questions schools faced involved precisely these provisions concerning student medical and mental-health records and privacy.
IL26-001 would also restore several parental medical-notification provisions. Parents would have a statutory right to receive prior notification when medical services are being offered to their child, notification when medication or medical services could affect insurance payments or copays; and notification when a school has arranged medical treatment requiring follow-up care outside normal school hours.
The initiative also restores immediate parental-notification provisions involving criminal activity and law enforcement. A parent would generally be notified when a criminal action is deemed to have been committed against or by their child, when law enforcement questions the student, and when the student is removed from campus without parental permission, including to stay at a youth shelter or host home.
Another major section gives parents notice and the ability to opt their children out of a broad range of school activities involving sensitive subjects. This includes surveys, assignments, questionnaires, role-playing activities, recordings, and other student engagements that ask about a child’s sexual experiences or attractions, family beliefs, morality, religion, political affiliations, or mental-health and psychological problems. It separately restores opt-out rights for instruction involving sexual activity.
Parents would also be entitled to examine classroom textbooks and curriculum, receive school calendars and information about required fees and dress codes, and be informed when a student’s academic performance could jeopardize promotion to the next grade. These provisions are mixed into the same initiative with the much more consequential rules governing medical information, counseling records, shelters, and abuse-related records.
One of the most important differences between IL26-001 and current law concerns what happens when the parent may be abusing the student. Current Washington law protects health-care, social-work, counseling, and disciplinary records not only while the parent is the target of an abuse or neglect investigation, but also when the parent is the defendant in a criminal proceeding in which the student is the named victim. IL26-001 would remove that broader language and return to a narrower protection that excludes the criminal proceeding provision.
That difference is extremely important. A student escaping an abusive household does not suddenly become safe the moment an investigation ends, nor does every dangerous situation begin with an already-open CPS investigation. Abuse often has to be disclosed before an investigation can even begin. IL26-001 would also remove the current statute’s explicit statement that the parental-rights section does not create a private right of action. The initiative therefore restores a legal framework giving parents much broader statutory access to information about what their children tell schools, including information concerning health and mental health, while simultaneously narrowing some of the specific protections the Legislature enacted for students whose parents are accused of harming them.
How the Initiative will Harm Youth with Abusive Parents
One of the most dangerous assumptions behind expansive parental-notification policies is the idea that telling a parent about a student’s struggles will automatically make the situation better.
For abused children, sometimes the parent is the problem.
Washington law specifically makes professional school personnel, nurses, social-service counselors, psychologists, and numerous other professionals mandatory reporters. When they have reasonable cause to believe a child has suffered abuse or neglect, they are required to report it to law enforcement or child-protection authorities. Washington’s mandatory-reporting statute therefore makes school professionals an important pathway through which abused children can obtain outside intervention.
There are real cases showing exactly why this matters. In the Texas case Noland v. State, a 12-year-old girl disclosed to friends at school that her stepfather was sexually abusing her. The friends went to school counselor Kim Vaughn, who spoke with the child and reported the allegations to Child Protective Services. CPS investigated, police became involved, the girl was removed from the home, and the stepfather was ultimately convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child. The court’s account of the case shows how a school counselor can become the bridge between a child suffering privately at home and the outside systems capable of protecting them.
A much more recent Massachusetts case demonstrates another danger: retaliation after a child tells school officials what is happening at home. Recently, a 15-year-old reported an incident involving their father, Joseph Kutzko, to school personnel. Court records accused Kutzko of punching the teenager, pulling their hair and threatening them. He was arrested and pleaded not guilty; the case was later placed on a path toward dismissal subject to conditions including anger-management treatment, staying away from the teenager and complying with a restraining order. The teenager’s mother, Arlene Kutzko, was separately charged with witness intimidation after allegedly pressuring the teenager to tell the school that they had been exaggerating.
Despite how the abuse was the most prevalent aspect of the case, the case was hijacked as a culture war for conservatives, as they emphasized the issue around the teenager’s gender identity. Because the parents had been unsupportive of the teenager’s transgender identity before the arrests for abuse, the parents accused the school of attempting to facilitate the child’s transition and violate their parental rights. The case became a major lawsuit, with many people rushing to support the abusive parents, focusing on the gender identity conflict while ignoring the accusations of abuse. The case illustrates something critical about youth safety: children can face intense retaliation from “parental rights” precisely because they disclosed family abuse to schools.
The investigation into the abuse ended up closing as the parent’s lawsuit remained, while the teenager remained away from the parent’s custody after the state’s child protective services’ review of the circumstances. This is where IL26-001 could be dangerous for abused youth in similar situations, because under IL26-001, the parents who were involved in this situation could acquire all of their child’s records relating to their counseling history, medical history, etc. So if a child was discussing their sexual orientation or gender identity to a school consular, which would likely occur in a case where their parents were supportive of their identity, the abusive parents would then be able to find out about this. This could give the abusive parents ammunition to attack the school or the child, in an attempt to sabotage the teenager’s ability to speak freely with school personnel about important topics to them such as their gender identity, especially when those topics have created tension between them and their parents.
Now imagine being a teenager in that position while knowing that your parent possesses this new, unusually broad statutory right to request school-maintained counseling, health, social, disciplinary, and other personal records, and potentially use it against them and their school. This alone can alter whether a young person feels safe enough to speak.
That creates a serious problem with the protection IL26-001 provides for abuse investigations. The initiative says certain records do not have to be released while the parent is already the target of a pending abuse or neglect investigation. But how does the investigation begin in the first place? Frequently, someone must report the abuse. And often, the person who first learns about it is a teacher, counselor, nurse, therapist, friend, or other trusted adult.
A teenager may spend months living with abuse before ever telling anyone. They may test the waters with a counselor by talking about their home life without immediately describing an incident that would traditionally qualify as child abuse and prompt a mandatory report. They may discuss how scared they are of their father, how their mother controls their friendships, how their parents punish them for their gender identity identity, or how they have been threatened if they ever tell anyone what occurs inside the home. That conversation may happen before any formal investigation exists.
This is exactly when privacy is most important. Once a student believes that talking honestly to a counselor could create records their abusive parent may obtain, the student has another reason to remain silent. The policy may therefore undermine the very process through which the statutory abuse exception would ever become relevant.
Washington’s own experience implementing Initiative 2081 shows that these concerns are not invented. OSPI reported that medical and mental-health records produced some of the most difficult implementation questions, while student privacy and records were major subjects of public concern. It also reported receiving objections from some parents to students participating in common-interest groups such as Gay-Straight Alliances and Gender and Sexuality Alliances. The original law’s medical and mental-health disclosure provisions were serious enough that a King County judge temporarily blocked portions dealing with the 10-day records deadline and student medical, health, and mental-health confidentiality while litigation proceeded. The litigation demonstrates how substantial the privacy conflict was from the moment Initiative 2081 took effect.
The same concern applies when a student needs temporary shelter. IL26-001 restores a right to immediate notification when a student is removed from campus without parental permission, including to stay at a youth shelter or host home. Separate Washington laws still govern shelters and child-abuse situations, but placing immediate parental notification directly into the Parents’ Bill of Rights creates an obvious tension when the reason a teenager is seeking outside shelter is danger inside the home. Laws governing every child in Washington cannot be written as though every parent is safe. The children who have the greatest need for privacy are precisely the ones whose parents may be the least willing to respect it.
How this Initiative Harms Youth When Child Protective Services Fail them
There is another major problem with relying on the abuse-investigation exception as adequate protection for vulnerable students: an open CPS investigation does not guarantee that the child will actually be protected. Child protective services regularly receives reports of abuse without removing the child from the home, and investigations can be closed even when serious concerns remain. As documented in extensive reporting on failures of CPS to intervene, child welfare agencies frequently attempt to address abuse through safety plans, counseling, parenting classes, supervision, or other services rather than removing the child from the home. Emotional abuse and Parental oppression can be particularly difficult for young people because it is often minimized as ordinary parenting or discipline, even when the parent’s controlling, threatening, isolating, or discriminatory behavior is severely damaging the child’s mental health.
There are horrific examples showing that even repeated reports and an active child-welfare response do not necessarily get a child out of danger. In DeShaney v. Winnebago County, authorities received multiple reports that Joshua DeShaney was being abused by his father, temporarily took him into custody, and continued documenting concerns after he was returned home. Yet he remained with his father until he was beaten so severely that he suffered permanent brain damage. Other documented cases have involved investigations being closed despite children corroborating reports of abuse, repeated warning signs being missed, and children ultimately being seriously injured or killed while still in parental custody. An abuse report, therefore, should not be treated as though it creates an immediate wall of protection around a young person. Sometimes a student reports abuse, CPS investigates, and the student still goes home to the same parent that night.
That possibility makes expanded parental access to counseling-related information especially concerning. Imagine that a teenager privately tells a school counselor that their mother constantly humiliates them, searches their belongings, isolates them from friends, threatens them, or punishes them because of their sexuality or gender identity. The counselor reports the situation, but CPS decides that the conduct does not meet the threshold for removal, closes the investigation, or simply leaves the teenager in the home while services are attempted. The teenager is now still living with the person they reported. If that parent is then able to obtain school records revealing what the teenager discussed with school professionals, the disclosure could expose the student to retaliation for asking for help in the first place. Under the version of Washington’s parental-rights law that IL26-001 would restore, “records of any mental health counseling” are expressly included among the school records parents are generally entitled to request, while the specific abuse-related exception is tied to a pending abuse or neglect investigation.
We already know what this type of retaliation can look like. In one first-hand story documented in our report on Failures of CPS to Intervene, a young person experiencing emotional and physical abuse related to his gender identity tried to get outside help. Police responded but left him in the home, after which his mother allegedly treated him worse and punished him for attempting to seek help. CPS was later contacted with a list of abusive incidents, but according to the account, the agency spoke with him once at school and did not open a further investigation. This is exactly why a student’s ability to safely speak with counselors and other school professionals cannot depend on the assumption that CPS will immediately rescue them once abuse is disclosed. When the system fails to intervene, confidentiality may be one of the few protections that student has left.
For young people living with abusive or oppressive parents, increased parental access to counseling information can therefore create a dangerous cycle. A student reaches out for help, the school reports the abuse, CPS investigates but leaves the student in the home, and the parent then learns more about what the child disclosed. That knowledge can be used to punish the child, increase surveillance, confiscate devices, cut the student off from support systems, prohibit further contact with counselors, pressure the child to retract allegations, or simply teach the child that asking adults for help makes their situation worse. The result may be that the young person never reaches out again. A system designed to protect children should be encouraging abused youth to speak openly with trusted adults, not creating another reason for them to remain silent.
The Harms of Giving Parents Increased Access to Youth Mental Health and Medical Records
These privacy concerns become even more serious when mental-health care is involved. Now luckily, Washington law has created circumstances in which adolescents can independently seek confidential behavioral-health support, but IL26-001 would simultaneously restore a school statute expressly declaring that “records of any mental health counseling” are among the school records parents may request. This can be a major problem for youth in abused homes seeking mental health support from schools.
First of all, young people desperately need access to mental-health support. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that 39.7% of high-school students experienced persistent sadness or hopelessness, 28.5% reported poor mental health, 20.4% seriously considered attempting suicide, and 9.5% reported a suicide attempt during the previous year. School-based support can make a real difference. A meta-analysis of 29 rigorous studies involving 22,420 students found that school-based mental-health interventions significantly reduced depression and anxiety, with especially strong results in several categories including clinician-delivered programs and interventions for secondary-school students.
However, what’s critical to understand is that a student will only disclose sensitive information when they believe doing so is safe.
A 2024 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology examined the experiences of 1,495 adolescents who had disclosed suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, or nonsuicidal self-injury in therapy. Researchers found a wide range of parental reactions after disclosure, including validating responses but also invalidating reactions and restrictions on adolescents’ access to people, places, and activities. The researchers specifically examined what happened after parents were informed, illustrating why confidentiality and the manner in which disclosure occurs can materially affect a young person’s experience of seeking help.
Some parents dismiss mental illness entirely. Others call their children dramatic, rebellious, sinful, attention-seeking, or manipulative. Some respond by taking away phones, isolating the child from friends, increasing surveillance, or punishing them for opening up. In those households, requiring or facilitating parental notification does not automatically connect a young person with a support system. It can expose the young person to the very person they were afraid to tell.
This overlaps directly with the problem of parental medical neglect. Parental medical neglect can include refusing necessary medical treatment, ignoring serious symptoms, denying therapy or psychiatric care, withholding medication, substituting ideology or faith healing for necessary treatment, or dismissing a child’s health problems as exaggeration or attention-seeking. Because minors have limited ability to independently schedule care, obtain prescriptions, travel to appointments, or pay for treatment, a parent who refuses care can effectively trap a young person without meaningful alternatives.
Cases like these demonstrate the fundamental problem with treating parental authority as though it inherently protects a child’s health. Sometimes parents are the reason necessary medical care is being withheld. A teenager suffering from depression should not become less able to seek help because a medically neglectful parent disapproves of counseling. A child living with a parent who distrusts doctors should not have fewer avenues to speak privately with a school nurse or health professional. And a student whose parents are deliberately preventing outside adults from discovering abuse should not have to wonder whether seeking help will create another trail of information flowing directly back into the home.
How “Parental Opt-Out” Rights can Harm LGBTQ Teenagers and Youth in Controlling Home Environments
LGBTQ+ youth can face particularly severe consequences when privacy disappears. The CDC found enormous disparities in its 2023 survey: 65.7% of LGBQ+ students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, 53.5% reported poor mental health, 41% seriously considered suicide, and 19.7% reported attempting suicide. Family rejection can substantially worsen those risks. Research from the Family Acceptance Project found that, in its sample of LGBT young adults, reported suicide attempts were 22% among those without sexual-orientation change efforts, 48% among those whose parents tried to change their sexual orientation, and 63% among those who experienced both parental efforts and interventions from therapists or religious leaders. The underlying peer-reviewed study also linked parent-initiated change efforts to depression, suicidal thoughts and attempts, lower life satisfaction, and reduced social support.
For a teenager living in that environment, a school may be the only place where they can safely tell someone that they are gay, transgender, questioning their faith, suffering from depression, or frightened by what is happening at home. A counselor may be the only adult they trust. A Gay-Straight Alliance may be the only physical community where they do not have to hide who they are.
The parental opt-out provisions raise a serious concern because they allow the very parents who may be creating a harmful home environment to restrict a student’s exposure to subjects that could help them understand what they are experiencing. The version of the law that IL26-001 would restore gives parents the right to opt their child out of a broad category of surveys, assignments, questionnaires, role-playing activities, recordings, and other student engagements involving the student’s sexual experiences or attractions, family beliefs, morality, religion, political affiliations, or mental-health and psychological problems. These are not insignificant subjects for a vulnerable teenager. They are often the exact topics a young person may need opportunities to explore when they are growing up in a controlling household where questioning a parent’s religious beliefs, discussing their sexuality, acknowledging mental-health struggles, or challenging family expectations is discouraged or punished.
For LGBTQ+ youth, the potential consequences are especially concerning. A gay or transgender student living with rejecting parents may already have very few places where they can safely learn about their identity, understand that other young people have similar experiences, or speak honestly about how rejection at home is affecting them. The CDC specifically recommends supportive school practices for LGBTQ+ students, including safe spaces, inclusive school policies, supportive staff, and equal access to student-led LGBTQ+ clubs. The CDC notes that these clubs can improve students’ mental health and well-being and make schools more welcoming and supportive. Giving rejecting, oppressive and controlling parents additional tools to remove their children from school activities simply because those activities involve sexuality, attraction, gender-related issues, or conflicting family beliefs risks cutting vulnerable students off from exactly the kind of supportive school environment that research says can protect them.
This matters because parental rejection itself can be extremely damaging to LGBTQ+ youth. Research from the Family Acceptance Project found that young LGBTQ+ people who experienced high levels of family rejection during adolescence had dramatically worse health outcomes, including substantially higher rates of depression and suicide attempts. Separate research from the project found that parent-led efforts to change a young person’s sexual orientation were associated with even higher rates of attempted suicide, particularly when those efforts also involved therapists or religious leaders. A legal framework that gives these same rejecting or controlling parents greater ability to decide whether their child can participate in school activities touching on sexuality, family beliefs, religion, or mental health therefore deserves serious scrutiny. In a supportive household, an opt-out may simply reflect a disagreement over curriculum. In a hostile household, it can become another method of preventing a young person from encountering information, perspectives, or people who challenge the parent’s treatment of them.
The problem is not limited to LGBTQ+ students; controlling and oppressive parents can also use opt-outs to shelter young people from information that might help them recognize unhealthy family dynamics. A student who has been raised to believe that severe parental control is normal may benefit enormously from a classroom discussion about mental health, healthy relationships, personal boundaries, religious freedom, or differing moral and political beliefs. A student who has been taught that depression is a moral failing may first learn at school that mental-health conditions are legitimate and treatable. A teenager subjected to intense religious control may benefit from discovering that other people hold different beliefs and that they are allowed to develop beliefs of their own. When parents can remove a child from activities precisely because they address the family’s beliefs, morality, religion, politics, or mental health, the parents most determined to control what their children are allowed to think are also the parents most likely to use that authority.
Parents enforcing this control over teenagers creates a form of informational isolation. A controlling parent does not necessarily have to physically abuse a child to severely restrict their development. Broad parental opt-outs make it easier to extend the boundaries of an oppressive household into the classroom, allowing the parent’s restrictions to follow the student into one of the few environments where they might otherwise encounter different ideas and supportive adults.
There is also a broader mental-health consequence to isolating students from their school communities. CDC research on school connectedness has repeatedly found that students who believe adults and peers at school care about them are less likely to experience a range of harmful health and behavioral outcomes. This is particularly important for transgender and questioning students. In the CDC’s 2023 national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, transgender and questioning students reported substantially more poor mental health, bullying, unsafe school experiences, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors than cisgender students, while also reporting lower school connectedness. The CDC specifically identifies supportive families and peers, school connectedness, affirmed names and pronouns, and pride in one’s identity as protective factors. For a young person who does not have those protections at home, reducing their ability to find them at school can be particularly harmful.
These opt-out provisions therefore need to be viewed in the context of who is likely to use them and why. A supportive parent may use an opt-out because of a narrow disagreement with a particular assignment. But an abusive, intensely religious, anti-LGBTQ+, or otherwise controlling parent can use the same authority to systematically remove their child from discussions and activities that contradict the parent’s worldview or give the young person language to describe what is happening to them. The student has no independent veto over that decision. If the parent says no, the child can lose access regardless of whether the activity would provide information, community, or emotional support that the student personally wants and needs.
This is one of the fundamental problems with treating parental authority as interchangeable with a student’s best interests. The young person whose parents are most determined to prevent them from learning about sexuality, mental health, alternative religious beliefs, or different ways of living may be the same young person who most desperately needs access to that information. Schools should not become another mechanism through which controlling parents can isolate children from ideas, relationships, and support systems that exist outside the home.
How the Initiative Opposes Basic Student Rights
Perhaps the most important philosophical difference between the 2024 and 2025 frameworks is that the Legislature eventually recognized something that is frequently missing from “parents’ rights” debates: students themselves are rights-holders.
The 2025 legislation established a formal Statement of Student Rights. It recognizes that Washington public-school students possess rights including access to a basic education, a safe and supportive learning environment free from harassment and bullying, an academic environment free from unlawful discrimination, constitutional freedoms such as speech, assembly and religious exercise, special-education rights, and access to historically and scientifically accurate instructional materials. Schools are required to develop student-focused materials explaining those rights.
The legislation also directed school policies to prioritize student safety, access to a discrimination-free academic environment, access to education, and privacy. The 2025 reforms attempted to place parental rights within a larger framework in which a student’s safety, privacy and individual legal rights also matter. IL26-001 would restore the older version of the parental-rights statute, including the broader records and notification provisions and the narrower abuse record protection.
A rights framework has to account for the child with a supportive parent and the child with an abusive one. It has to account for the teenager whose mother immediately finds them a therapist and the teenager whose mother punishes them for admitting they are depressed. It has to account for the parent who advocates for a disabled child and the parent who refuses necessary medical care. It has to account for the family that supports an LGBTQ+ teenager and the family that responds with isolation, coercive religious practices, or attempts to change the teenager’s identity.
Most importantly, it has to recognize that a young person is not simply an extension of their parents. Young people have private thoughts, beliefs, identities, relationships, health concerns, and personal struggles of their own. Their ability to safely communicate with a counselor or another trusted adult can become critical when the people who ordinarily control their lives are the source of the problem.
IL26-001 would explicitly give parents access to records of “any mental health counseling,” establish medical-notification rights, create broad opt-outs involving mental health, sexuality, religion and family beliefs, and narrow the current protection for records involving accused or investigated parents. Those provisions deserve to be evaluated from the perspective of the students who will actually live under them, not solely from the perspective of the adults demanding more control over their lives. If Washington wants students to report abuse, seek mental-health support, develop their own identities and beliefs, and trust the adults at school who are supposed to help them, students need to know that asking for help will not automatically surrender their privacy to the very person they may be asking for help from.
Student rights, privacy, safety, free access to information, being able to report abuse, safe communication with trusted school adults and basic autonomy are extremely valuable for students to have. Any law governing the relationship between students, parents, and schools needs to recognize that students deserve these basic rights, and above all, vulnerable young people need somewhere safe to turn.
NYRA strongly opposes Washington’s “Parental Rights” Initiative IL26-001, and we urge voters to vote against this initiative if they care about protecting the rights of vulnerable students from abusive and controlling parents who will only harm their lives.
The National Youth Rights Association
If you’re interested in Youth Rights, consider volunteering with us. We are always looking for new members and would love to have you on board. If you have a personal story to share about how increased parental rights have harmed you while you were young, could harm you, or about a youth rights violation you’ve experienced, consider sending us an email at nyra@youthrights.org. We’d love to help get your story out to the world.
The text of Vote NO on Washington Initiative IL26-001 Parental Rights in Schools © 2026 by Zane Miller is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
