The Department of Education (DOE) found five Northern Virginia school districts guilty of violating federal Title IX civil rights laws.
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) commenced its investigation in February, after lawsuits, informal complaints and reports against the districts alleged that students “avoid using school restrooms whenever possible because of the schools’ policies, and that female students have witnessed male students inappropriately touching other students and watching female students change in a female locker room,” according to the DOE press release.
On July 25, the DOE announced that Alexandria City Public Schools, Arlington Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools and Prince William County Public Schools had committed sex discrimination under Title IX for permitting students to access “intimate, sex-segregated facilities based on the students’ subjective ‘gender identity.’”
“Although this type of behavior was tolerated by the previous Administration, it’s time for Northern Virginia’s experiment with radical gender ideology and unlawful discrimination to come to an end,” said Craig Trainor, OCR’s acting assistant secretary. “OCR’s investigation definitively shows that these five Virginia school districts have been trampling on the rights of students in the service of an extreme political ideology.”
The OCR proposed an agreement as a means to resolve the five districts’ violations. If the districts do not agree within 10 days, the districts risk “imminent enforcement action including referral to the U.S. Department of Justice.”
Under the proposed agreement, the districts must withdraw policies and regulations that permit students to use such spaces based on gender identity rather than biology. The districts must distribute a memorandum to the schools in each division that ensures future polices comply with Title IX law. The districts must agree to follow Title IX and use the words “male” and “female” according to biological definitions.
Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin responded to the investigation’s results.
“These school divisions have been violating federal law, deliberately neglecting their responsibility to protect students’ safety, privacy and dignity, and ignoring parents’ rights,” Youngkin said in a press release. “They got away with this behavior because the Biden administration backed them up. Commonsense is back, with biological boys and girls in their own locker rooms and bathrooms, and boys out of girls’ sports.”
The proposal complies with President Donald Trump’s January executive order known as Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government, which established that “male” and “female” refer to biological sex rather than gender identity, and the federal government recognizes the two sexes as the only sexes. Federal agencies must also comply with such standards in policies, including Title IX.
