(DCNF)—A handful of California school districts helped hundreds of students change their so-called “gender identity” on official records, documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.
Across six districts serving nearly 158,000 total students that provided data from the 2023-2024 school year, more than 300 children were placed on “gender support plans” or had their names or pronouns modified in school systems, according to records requests submitted by the Interfaith Statewide Coalition, a group of parents and faith leaders defending parental rights.
Sarah Do, an Interfaith Statewide Coalition board member and refugee from Vietnam, told the DCNF she is “appalled at the deception coming from our public schools.”
“They are exploiting the trust of immigrant families by teaching children gender ideologies that contradict our family and cultural values,” Do told the DCNF. “Interfaith leaders are uniting to expose these secret gender changes going on behind parents’ backs through our schools. Some districts have been transparent to respond to our public record requests, others refuse transparency to the very taxpayers funding public education.”
It’s unclear whether parents were notified of the changes because most districts did not directly disclose this information, but several have policies against informing parents.
The Trump administration launched an investigation into California’s Department of Education in March over a law Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2024 that prohibits schools from requiring teachers and staff to notify parents when their child is identifying as transgender. The Department of Education (ED) alleged the law, which took effect on Jan. 1, violates the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA).
In the Santa Ana Unified School District, public records data shows there have been 260 instances of students in grades 4-12 changing their names due to their gender identity since 2017. Last year, the district provided name changes for 51 students.
Naye Morales, who was a parent volunteer in Santa Ana schools for 9 years, pulled her kids out after finding out what they were “doing behind parents’ backs” — including stocking the libraries with “sexually explicit” books and implementing a policy in 2023 that keeps students’ gender identity hidden from parents.
The district is facing major layoffs, passing a plan in January to eliminate nearly 300 employees, according to NBC Los Angeles. “A big reason for that is decreased enrollment,” Morales said.
Andrea Tapia, whose daughter will be returning to high school in the Santa Ana district in the fall, told the DCNF the numbers make her wonder whether parents were aware when their child’s name was changed.
“I would want the opportunity to speak to my Child before having a teacher or a staff member at school change their identity,” Tapia said. “I would want to remind them that they are made in the image of God. They are made with a purpose and that they are perfect just the way they are.”
The Interfaith Statewide Coalition put up an ad in the district informing parents of the number.
In another Southern California district, more than a third of students with documented requests to change their gender had special needs, data shared with the DCNF shows.
During the 2023-2024 school year, 78 students in the Capistrano Unified School District requested gender changes, according to a public records request. Thirty of those students also had an Individualized Education Program (IEP), which accommodate students with special needs.
Capistrano was the only district to supply the Interfaith Statewide Coalition with the number of students on IEP’s who requested gender changes, Brenda Lebsack, coalition founder and Santa Ana Unified School District board member, told the DCNF.
The number of students on IEPs is “very significant,” Lebsack told the DCNF, highlighting a 2020 study that revealed transgender-identifying individuals were three to six times more likely to be autistic than those who do not identify as transgender.
Lebsack, also a special education teacher, suggested helping kids change their gender without parental knowledge could be a violation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which promises parents’ access to their child’s records upon request and requires parental consent for services.
“In the Procedural Safeguards given to parents at IEP meetings, they are told that their child will not have any services without written parent consent. This includes ‘related services’ such as counseling,” she told the DCNF. “But that is no longer the case, since schools now offer gender affirming services such as counseling.”
A total of 194 students have requested gender changes in the Capistrano district since 2017. The youngest child who requested a gender change was in preschool and had an IEP, data shows.
The Anaheim Union High School District implemented gender support plans for the first time during the 2023-2024 school year, when 53 plans were created for students, according to district data.
In the Moreno Valley Unified School District, 19 students identify as nonbinary and 356 students have a preferred pronoun listed in the district’s database, per records released in August 2024. Interim communications director Alex Sponheim told the DCNF that the district continues to follow the recent law preventing disclosure of student information related to gender identity to parents.
“The District does not maintain records that track the creation and implementation of Gender Identity/Support Plans,” Sponheim said.
In the Tustin Unified School District, 40 students requested to change their name in the 2023-2024 school year, which the district notes is for “a number of reasons including those related to gender, nicknames, change of legal name,” records show. The district did not respond to the DCNF’s request to clarify how many of these changes were directly related to gender identity.
In the Riverside Unified School District, there are 29 students who identify as “non-binary,” according to records requests.
“The District’s database does not indicate if a student is transgender or whether the student has a Gender Identity/Support Plan,” the response states.
During the 2023-2024 school year, 14 students in the Los Alamitos Unified School District requested a change of name, pronouns or gender identity. The district said lists of gender support plans “simply do not exist” and individual student plans are exempt from disclosure, per records requests.
Fourteen elementary school students and 96 secondary school students received Gender Support Plans during the 2022-2023 school year in the Irvine Unified School District, per records data from 2023.
In the Fullerton Joint Union High School District, 106 students requested to change their name in the 2023-2024 school year, which the district notes could include changes for reasons other than gender identity. Gender support plans were created for two students that same year and for one student during the 2022-2023 school year.
“Of the three support plans we have on record, all have included communication with parents,” Assistant Superintendent Karl Zener wrote in an August 2024 response to the Interfaith Statewide Coalition.
While some districts offered data, several that received requests from the Interstate Faith Coalition declined to provide numbers or said they did not keep track of gender support plans.
The Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District offers Gender Support Plans for its students without requiring parental knowledge. Guidance tells students they have a right to be referred to by their “authentic name and pronoun” and use the bathroom that corresponds to their “gender identity.” The district did not provide the number of plans it created in response to a public records request and did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Not every district has accepted state requirements to cut parents out of the loop. The Chino Valley Unified School District filed a federal lawsuit against the state in July 2024, alleging California’s new law prohibiting parental notification violates FERPA, as well as the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Flickr/ Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office)
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.