Trump Admin Terminates Settlements That Protected Trans Students From Harassment
As the war on trans people rages, the DoEd Office for Civil Rights is canceling policies that were negotiated to protect transgender students from discrimination.
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It appears to be an unprecedented, yet not surprising move: on Monday, the Trump administration terminated all, or portions of, six civil rights settlements that had been negotiated during the Biden and Obama administrations that were intended to provide protections and equal opportunity for trans students. This includes federal support for agreements with school districts in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Washington State, plus two school districts and Taft College, a community college in California.
The move is one of a long string of efforts – made by individual targeting as well as broad strokes – to decimate fairness and diversity across the spectrum of institutions in this country—education, deemed as wokeful, and thus front and center in the cross-hairs.
“This appears to be a highly unusual and aggressive use of [Office for Civil Rights] OCR authority, and I would expect it to be challenged,” says Nancy Potter, a former supervising attorney at the U.S. Department of Education. Potter, who now runs her own practice, points out that OCR resolution agreements are usually not damages settlements in the ordinary sense:
“They generally require policy changes, training, reporting, monitoring, and other corrective steps. So I would not assume there is much previously paid settlement money to claw back unless a particular agreement included a specific monetary remedy. The more immediate issue is prospective: the federal government telling schools to rescind existing protections and threatening new investigations or funding consequences if they do not,” she tells GO.
Case in point: The Delaware Valley school district had agreed in 2016 to update its policies and procedures after a transgender student complained about its repeated refusal to comply with a name change and preferred pronouns. The student was also denied access to facilities that aligned with their gender identity. OCR required the district to adopt trans-inclusive policies and protections for students.
School board members raised alarms about these protections last year, shortly after Trump signed “Biological Truth” executive orders aimed at erasing the rights of Americans who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. In November, a conservative policy group in Georgia with ties to the Trump administration sent a letter to Kimberly M. Richey, the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department, requesting that the agreement with Delaware Valley be terminated.
By February, to Potter’s point, threats were made around potential funding cuts and a possible “directed investigation” if the school district failed to rescind trans-inclusive policies and procedures (the reasoning being wrapped around Title IX). Last month, the school board voted to overturn the civil rights resolution and heed orders, according to records and local reporting.
“What makes [the Delaware Valley matter] significant is that it appears to go beyond withdrawal of oversight,” Potter tells GO. “If OCR is telling a district to undo policies it previously adopted under a federal civil rights agreement, that is a much more aggressive step.”
While Potter would caution about assuming that every targeted termination might be unlawful, she states that the current action seems to go well beyond simply ending monitoring on older matters. “The broader point, in my view, is that there is a real difference between closing monitoring on an old agreement and requiring a school to unwind compliance measures it previously adopted. The second move is much more consequential for schools and students, because it does not just remove federal oversight. It pressures schools to reverse protections that students may already be relying on.”
According to the New York Times, the Trump administration has initiated at least 40 civil rights investigations into educational institutions that provide protections for transgender students. Some districts appear to be learning about the decision with little notice, hearing for the first time about it on Monday, along with the general public.
