A Chino-based group looking to put a referendum on the ballot to halt a new law that gives additional legal protections to transgender public school students has come up short, according to the office of Secretary of State Debra Bowen. But they did collect enough signatures, according to a sample count, to trigger a full recount of the total 619,244 signatures collected.

Assembly Bill 1266, signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in September, took effect Jan. 1, allowing transgender students to participate in gender-restricted programs like sports programs and access gender-restricted facilities like bathrooms and locker rooms based on what gender they identify as, rather than the sex they were born into.

Opponents say the law will allow curious teens to ogle members of the opposite sex while at their most vulnerable, and for male students to game the system by dominating female sports teams. Chino-based group Privacy For All Students collected signatures during the fall to put the matter before voters as a referendum on the 2014 ballot.

But school district officials said Wednesday those issues haven’t emerged under similar policies.

“We’ve had no problems” with a 2005 Los Angeles Unified policy similar to AB 1266, said Judy Chiasson, program coordinator for Los Angeles Unified’s Office of Human Relations, Diversity and Equity. “It’s never happened (that a student has falsely claimed to be transgendered).”

Wednesday morning, Bowen’s office released the final tally: According to a representative sample of the signatures collected across the state, PFAS has come up 22,178 short of the 504,760 qualified signatures needed for the referendum to be placed on the Nov. 4 ballot. (That number is 5 percent of all the votes cast for governor in the last gubernatorial election.)

But it’s not quite over for the referendum: A sample count between 95 and 110 percent of the target number triggers an automatic full count of all submitted signatures, under state law. (The previous sampling effort just looks at 500 signatures or 3 percent of the signatures submitted in each county, whichever was greater.)

“We’re, of course, happy that it did not qualify, but alarmed that it did just barely qualify for a full count,” said John O’Connor, executive director of Equality California, one of the groups that originally sponsored AB 1266. His group had previously fought California’s 2008 Proposition 8, which created a state constitutional amendment stating that only marriages between men and women are legal or recognized in California. (The Supreme Court dismissed the final appeal of Hollingsworth v. Perry in June, effectively striking down Proposition 8.)

“This is a very real attack on transgender kids and their opportunity to succeed at school, just like every other kid gets,” O’Connor said.

The woman who originally filed the referendum remained optimistic about chances that a recount could get it to the ballot.

“We’re very confident — very, very confident. We thought that from the beginning,” said Gina Gleason, director of faith and public policy at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, where PFAS is based. “We knew this was a winning issue.”

County registrars of voters have until Feb. 24 to complete their full check of all submitted signatures, 30 working days after Wednesday’s sample ballot count ended.

Until the counting is completed, Gleason said, schools should not be putting the law into effect, as districts have begun to do.

“Unfortunately, the state changed the sampling process a few years ago to save money, resulting in many more signatures being improperly invalidated,” Karen England, executive director of Sacramento-based conservative advocacy group Capitol Resource Institute and a spokeswoman for PFAS, said in a news release issued Wednesday afternoon.

“With a full check, every signature is verified by elections officials, and we expect that process will result in thousands of more signatures being found to be valid. When all the signatures are examined, we believe that we will have enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.”

Transgender teen and activist Eli Erlick, who graduated from high school in Mendocino County earlier this year, said AB 1266 would have made her academic career very different, had it existed previously.

“I would have, frankly, been a lot more comfortable with myself. I would have been able to more fully participate in school. I came out when I was 8 years old in school, and for six years, I wasn’t able to participate in activities with the other girls,” Erlick said. “When I was 13, my parents allowed me to completely transition socially.”

Her community supported her transition, she said, which made it easier, but AB 1266 would have helped make the process easier, as school officials would have a plan on how to deal with a transgender student on campus before facing the situation themselves.

“There were no other transgender students in my town, which is really why it’s so great that this law covers the whole state,” Erlick said.

The echoes of the 2008 Proposition 8 campaign are no coincidence: In an October interview with The National Review, Frank Schubert, the head of the Proposition 8 campaign, said he is leading the fight against AB 1266 as well.

“I think it’s really unfortunate that these groups are attacking children for their own advantage,” Erlick said. “This bill is about allowing boys to participate with boys, girls to participate with girls, that’s it. This has nothing to do with co-ed bathrooms.”