Township High School District 211 in Palatine, Illinois, said it will provide changing areas in the girls’ locker room for the student, who has not been named, and for other students, within 30 days.
Advertisement
An agreement approved early Wednesday morning by the Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 school board dictates that a transgender student will use a separate changing area within a girls locker room but not have unrestricted access to that locker room.
OCR assistant secretary Catherine Lhamon told BuzzFeed News on Thursday that the settlement applies to all trans students in the district, not just the one who brought her complaint to the Department of Education in December 2013.
School officials have withheld their opinion during the public debate that they were protecting the privacy of all of its students by not allowing the student full access to the locker room – even if it was required by federal law. The letter notified the district that it was in violation of Title IX, which protects all students, including transgender students, from sex discrimination in K-12 districts that receive federal funding.
If other students request additional privacy measures, the district must provide them with a “reasonable alternative”. And it requires the district to revise an annual notice of nondiscrimination to say it does not discriminate on the basis of sex in its educational programs or activities, she said.
He added: ‘If she does not change in private changing stations, the agreement does not require the District to allow access’.
“No student should be labeled as different by their school, or denied full and equal participation at school with their peers”, he said.
Those comments set off a firestorm of their own, with an official with the American Civil Liberties Union of IL accusing the district of misrepresenting the nature of the settlement.
Engage a consultant (who may be a district employee) with expertise in child and adolescent gender identity, including transgender and gender nonconforming youth, to support and assist the district in implementing the resolution agreement. “If they didn’t have the anatomy, it would be different”.
“The difference is in how we define gender”, Miller said. “In doing so, the administration is treating them as though they weren’t human beings at all”.
Advertisement
The student in question has already said it is her preference to use a private changing area, but the issue could cause conflict in the future if more transgender pupils come forward. One student started a petition urging for the student’s access to the girls’ locker room.
