Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed SB1229, requiring parental notice and opt-out for LGBTQ curriculum

On May 5, 2021, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed SB1229 (Sen. Rose; House companion HB0529, Rep. Moody) into law as Public Chapter 281, after the measure passed the Senate 24-6 and the House 64-23. The law amends Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49, Chapter 6, Part 13 to require local education agencies and public charter schools to notify a student's parent or guardian at least 30 days before beginning any instruction involving a "sexual orientation curriculum or gender identity curriculum," whether offered as part of family life education, sex education, or another program, and to let the parent excuse the student from any or all of that instruction by written request, without academic penalty for completing an assigned alternative lesson. The law does not require a school to offer such curriculum at all, and it exempts incidental responses to student questions and historical or contextual references to a person's sexual orientation or gender identity from the notice requirement.

No comparable parental-notice-and-opt-out requirement applies to any other subject in the Tennessee curriculum; the law singles out instruction touching sexual orientation or gender identity for the added procedural gate. Tennessee revisited the same code section two years later: SB1443 (2023) tightened this same notice-and-opt-out framework into an opt-in consent requirement for the same curriculum category, a distinct, later action recorded separately (entries/2023/05/17/tn-discriminatory-policy-f1ae9d59.yaml).