A California school district will pay $175,000 to settle a lawsuit after officials forced Christian fifth-graders to teach kindergartners gender ideology, then refused to let their parents opt out. The Encinitas Union School District's own sworn court record shows exactly why the opt-out was denied, and it is worse than the settlement announcement lets on.

What the "buddy program" actually made two boys do

In May 2024, a fifth-grade teacher at La Costa Heights Elementary in Carlsbad read his class My Shadow is Pink, a picture book about a boy who decides his "true" shadow is pink instead of blue. Two students in that class, an 11-year-old identified in court papers as S.E. and a 12-year-old identified as P.D., were then paired with kindergarten "buddies" as part of the school's mentoring program, according to the Hoodline account of the settlement.

The fifth-graders did not just watch the book. They ran a read-along video of it for their kindergarten buddy, asked the younger child to pick a color that "represents" his gender identity, and then traced the kindergartner's shadow on paper in that color. Both boys are practicing Christians, one evangelical and Catholic, the other Catholic, who believe God assigns sex at birth and that no one is free to choose a different one, according to the verified federal complaint filed on their behalf.

Parents Carlos and Jennifer Encinas asked for two things ahead of time: notice before similar material was taught, and the ability to pull their son out of it. The district said no to both, and it was not an isolated call. A second family, suing under the pseudonyms Tom and Rebecca Doe to protect their son, made the identical request and got the identical answer.

An administrator's own words explain why the answer was no

The reason for that refusal is the part almost no coverage of the settlement has quoted directly. The 55-page complaint is a sworn document, and it preserves verbatim remarks from mandatory staff training sessions run by Assistant Superintendent Amy Illingworth, the official responsible for selecting curriculum districtwide.

On the district's practice of building individualized "gender support plans" for students exploring a new name or pronoun, Illingworth told teachers directly: "the parents aren't in the plan, they never see the plan, they never know about the plan . . . I want a parent not to know." The same training materials described these plans as running from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Illingworth also told staff that "kids already know at this age if they're gay," and defended introducing gender identity material to small children by arguing that silence itself teaches "homophobic and transphobic putdowns." Whatever the merits of that view, it was never disclosed to parents who send their children to school assuming health and values instruction still passes through them first.

The district's legal theory: an opt-out law that only applied when it wanted it to

California actually has a statute on the books for exactly this situation. Education Code section 51240 says that if any part of a school's health instruction conflicts with a parent's religious training and beliefs, the student "shall be excused from the part of the instruction that conflicts," on written request.

The Encinitas district's position, laid out in the complaint, was that this right only exists inside a formally designated "health unit." A read-aloud book and a shadow-tracing activity built into a mentoring program did not count, in the district's view, no matter how directly it touched gender identity. Parents could request opt-outs for other reasons, the complaint alleges, just not this one.

The Supreme Court ruling that pulled the rug out from under that theory

The district's argument was still working its way through court in June 2025 when the Supreme Court decided a different case with nearly identical facts. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, Maryland parents objected on religious grounds to LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks added to their children's classrooms without notice or an opt-out. The Court ruled 6-3 that introducing the books without an opt-out substantially interfered with the parents' right to direct their children's religious upbringing, and that schools generally have to provide advance notice and a chance to opt out.

Encinitas Union had already lost the opt-out question at the trial court a month earlier. A federal judge granted the Encinas and Doe families a preliminary injunction in May 2025, finding they were likely to win on the merits and ordering the district to provide notice and opt-outs for gender identity material taught through the buddy program. The district appealed that loss in June, then walked away from the appeal in November, saying continuing to fight was no longer "fiscally responsible."

What $175,000 actually buys, line by line

The case formally ended this month. Under the settlement first reported by LifeSiteNews and detailed by Hoodline, Encinitas Union will pay $175,000 total: $10,000 set aside for each of the two student plaintiffs' future college expenses, $27,000 to attorney's fees, and the remainder split between the two sets of parents.

The district also formally rewrote its policy. Since August 2025, Encinitas Union has been required to give parents at least five calendar days' notice before teaching covered curriculum, with the right to opt out of anything that would "substantially interfere with religious development or threaten religious beliefs and practices." San Diego Unified, the region's largest district, adopted a similar written opt-out policy the same month.

Encinitas Union has not conceded wrongdoing. Marisa Janine-Page, co-counsel for the district, said the settlement is "not an admission or concession regarding the merits of the case," and argued there are no winners when litigation drains public education dollars away from classrooms. Nate Kellum, the First Liberty Institute attorney who represented the families, drew the opposite lesson. "No child should be forced to speak a message that violates his religious convictions," Kellum said, calling the outcome a warning to every other California district still weighing whether to fight a case like this one instead of settling early.

Speaking up cost this family more than legal fees

The complaint describes what happened after Carlos Encinas raised his objection at the school. District employees and other parents responded with open hostility, and the school PTA organized a "Pink Out the Hate" day, where half the school wore pink specifically in response to his family's complaint. The Encinas children received threats by phone and in person, according to the case summary on First Liberty's site, and both boys eventually had to transfer out of La Costa Heights entirely.

That detail matters for anyone tempted to read this as an abstract fight over curriculum standards. A fifth-grader who volunteered as a school ambassador and a mentor for special-needs students, praised by his own principal, ended up leaving his school because he and his family asked for the same accommodation California law already promised them in writing.

Why this outcome reaches past one school district

This was not Encinitas Union's first brush with this exact controversy. In 2022, the district drew criticism after sending a Halloween party flyer promoting a "family friendly" drag show, co-sponsored by a gender-clinic and a gay nightclub, which the district eventually pulled after admitting it "did not meet district approval criteria," according to reporting cited by LifeSiteNews. The pattern here is not one rogue teacher's lesson plan. It is a curriculum culture built and defended from the top, that only bent once a federal court and the Supreme Court both weighed in.

Kellum's warning to other districts is not idle. The same legal combination now exists everywhere in the country: a Supreme Court precedent in Mahmoud that requires notice and opt-outs for religiously objectionable material, and a paper trail, in Encinitas's case, showing an administrator who wanted parents kept in the dark by design. Any district still betting that quiet non-disclosure beats an honest opt-out policy just watched a neighbor pay $175,000 and lose in court twice to find out otherwise.

Hero image: the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building in San Diego, home to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, where the Encinas family's lawsuit was filed and where the preliminary injunction was granted. Photo by Another Believer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.