Denver school district pushes back but hasn’t decided whether to change all-gender bathrooms

Audio By Carbonatix

Enlarge

Denver school officials pushed back Friday against a U.S. Education Department finding that its all-gender bathrooms violate Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination, accusing the Trump administration of using that law to promote an “anti-trans agenda.”

In a statement, Denver Public Schools said the department did not cite any statutes or legal cases to back up its finding, announced Thursday, that multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms are unlawful, and vowed to support LGBTQ+ students, families and their supporters. However, the district has not decided whether to convert two all-gender bathrooms that sparked the probe back into boys’ and girls’ bathrooms, spokesperson Scott Pribble said.

The Education Department said it has offered the school district a chance to voluntarily make that change and others, such as rescinding any policies or guidance allowing students to use bathrooms based on their gender identity rather than their biological sex, within 10 days or risk unspecified enforcement action. It suggested that its federal funding could be cut.

The investigation began after the school district converted a girl’s restroom at East High School into an all-gender restroom while leaving another bathroom on the same floor exclusive to boys in January. The school district has said that was done as a result of a student-led process, and the bathroom had 12-foot (3.6-meter) tall partitions for privacy and security.

The school district later added a second all-gender restroom on the same floor that it said was meant to address concerns of unfairness.

The Education Department said the investigation was first the one involving the law that was undertaken by its Office for Civil Rights under the Trump administration.

Denver Public Schools said no one came to look at the bathrooms or conduct interviews as part of the probe, and its attempts to discuss remedies were ignored.

“We will protect all of our students from this hostile administration while we continue to raise the bar on achievement,” it said.

The district gets about $10 million a year in federal funds, which accounts for less than 1% of its annual $1.5 billion budget.

The Trump administration has launched about two dozen investigations of transgender policies in schools, including access to sports, locker rooms and bathrooms, according to data compiled by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news organization. Roughly half of the investigations focus at least in part on who gets to use bathrooms in some K-12 school districts in Virginia, Kansas, Washington state and Colorado.