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Indianapolis public school teacher Kayla Smiley has dropped her lawsuit over a state law that bans teaching topics on human sexuality to young children, about a month after a federal appeals court denied her attempt to halt the law’s enforcement.
In a post on X, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, who has strongly opposed gender- and sex-related education in schools, called the dismissal a “major win” and “a victory for parents’ rights and common sense.”
“The next step should be for legislators to get rid of this kind of instruction for every grade because woke nonsense doesn’t belong in our schools,” Rokita said in the Monday social media post.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, which represented Smiley, did not respond to The Indiana Lawyer’s request for comment in time for deadline.
In 2023, just before she was set to begin teaching first through third grades, Smiley sued Indiana Secretary of Education Katie Jenner to prevent enforcement of the then-recently passed House Enrolled Act 1608, which prohibits public schools from providing “any instruction” on “human sexuality” to students in pre-kindergarten through third grade.
Smiley argued that the new law would violate the First and 14th Amendments because it was too broad and vague. Because she thought words like “instruction” and “human sexuality” weren’t definitively defined in the law, Smiley worried that she may unintentionally break the statute and risk losing her teaching license, according to court documents.
Smiley filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, but U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana Judge James Hanlon denied the request.
Smiley appealed the decision, but the 7th Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling last month.
A primary reason the circuit court ruled against her request was because Smiley brought her lawsuit before the law went into effect.
“In short, we do not ‘assume’ that Indiana will enforce the statute improperly or ‘take no further steps to minimize the dangers of arbitrary enforcement,’” Circuit Court Judge Michael Scudder wrote in the April 22 opinion.
Sex- and gender-related content in schools has been a prominent issue among Indiana conservatives over the last several years.
In 2025, Republican state lawmakers successfully moved forward with legislation requiring schools to publish their sex education material online for families to review.
And this past legislative session, state Sen. Liz Brown, R-Fort Wayne, attempted to pass a bill that included banning transgender bathrooms in public schools, but it never made it out of the House public health committee.
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