Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court opted not to take up a case from Colorado concerning the rights of parents to oversee the upbringing and welfare of their children. Although three conservative justices agreed with the decision to reject the case, they voiced concerns about claims that public schools might be involved in facilitating a minor’s gender transition without informing parents.

The case, Jonathan Lee, et al. v. Poudre School District R-1, was brought to the Supreme Court by two families and their children. They sought clarification on whether a school district has the authority to override the assumption that parents act in their children’s best interests and assume that role itself.

Justice Samuel Alito, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, penned a brief statement accompanying the Tuesday orders list. They urged lower courts to tackle the complex constitutional issue of parental rights, even though they agreed not to proceed with this particular case from the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals at this time.

Earlier, Justice Alito had authored a majority opinion favoring parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, who wished to have their children exempted from reading books inclusive of LGBTQ+ themes in public schools. He noted that the petitioners in the Lee case were denied a writ of certiorari as they did not contest the basis of the lower court’s decision.

The 10th Circuit had ruled the parents didn’t “explain how policies that presume the district knows better than parents, or that discourage disclosure, directly caused district staff” to act in various ways, including:

• recruit students to attend GSA [Gender and Sexuality Alliance] meetings (including by misleading one student to coax her attendance),

• present dubious information to students about being transgender and about suicide,

• award prizes to students if they identify as transgender at the meeting,

• offer the staffs’ personal contact information to students so they could talk any time, and

• tell students that they didn’t have to tell their parents about what happened at the meeting, and that it might be unsafe to talk with their parents about gender-identity issues.

Alito, not moved to act at this time, nonetheless said he was “concerned,” both about the issues and how “some” federal courts have been “tempt[ed]” not to address “whether a school district violates parents’ fundamental rights ‘when, without parental knowledge or consent, it encourages a student to transition to a new gender or assists in that process.’”

“Petitioners tell us that nearly 6,000 public schools have policies — as respondent allegedly does — that purposefully interfere with parents’ access to critical information about their children’s gender-identity choices and school personnel’s involvement in and influence on those choices,” the justice wrote. “The troubling — and tragic — allegations in this case underscore the ‘great and growing national importance’ of the question that these parent petitioners present.”

The rejected case was brought by America First Legal, a law firm co-founded by Trump White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.