This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters . When the Delaware Valley School District board voted unanimously last month to reverse policies protecting transgender students that it had adopted a decade ago, some in the audience cried, “Shame!” Others said the board didn’t go far enough.
The Pennsylvania district had adopted those policies in the first place under pressure from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in response to a complaint from a transgender student. An agreement between the district and the federal government during the Obama administration called for more training for staff and more support for students changing their gender presentation.
Now that same agency had told the district the agreement was terminated . Officials had 30 days to remove gender from the district’s anti-discrimination policies or face consequences.
The board voted at its March meeting to require transgender students to use locker rooms and bathrooms that match their sex assigned at birth. The superintendent said social workers would meet with the affected students to go over the changes.
This whiplash is one potential outcome of the Trump administration’s decision to terminate civil rights agreements drawn up under previous Democratic administrations. The Education Department announced in early April that it was ending such agreements related to violations of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, in five school districts in four states, as well as for a California community college.
In other communities, little may change because local officials are more supportive of transgender rights. Nevertheless, multiple legal experts and former employees of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) told Chalkbeat that tearing up agreements reached after lengthy investigations and negotiations sends a dangerous message to all students: If you file a complaint, the resolution might last only as long as the next presidential election cycle. “Once you open that door to something that is unprecedented, where does it end?” “How far will it go?” asked Beth Gellman-Beer, an attorney who spent 18 years with the OCR under Republican and Democratic administrations. “Once you open that door to something that is unprecedented, where does it end? If we have another administration that is Democratic, what will they do? What will be the point for anyone to bring a case to OCR if they can’t trust whatever decision that comes out of that complaint will remain the decision?”
Revoking civil rights agreements is just one piece of a much larger transformation of the Office for Civil Rights, where a reduced staff focuses on cases that align with the president’s political priorities. And federal officials are blunt about how much the government’s approach has changed between the Obama and Biden administrations and Trump’s second term .
“Prior Administrations regularly misinterpreted Title IX to pander to political ideology and police ‘misgendering’ despite not having sound legal grounds,” Education Department spokeswoman Amelia Joy wrote in an email. By terminating past agreements, Joy wrote, “the Trump Administration is upholding the law and righting years of wrongs.”
Given what’s happened over the last few presidential administrations, canceling civil rights agreements was perhaps inevitable, said R. Shep Melnick, a Boston College political scientist who has studied civil rights enforcement extensively.
“The combination of presidential influence and partisan polarization means you have administrations that have very different understandings of how to interpret civil rights law,” Melnick said. “It’s not surprising, once the regulations flip back and forth, that agreements based on previous understanding of statute would be subject to change.”
Ending OCR agreements fits new enforcement approach
The Office for Civil Rights under Trump has made keeping transgender students out of bathrooms and off sports teams that match their gender identity one of its top priorities. Ending the six agreements, which all treated discrimination based on gender identity and sex stereotypes as Title IX violations , fits into that broader enforcement approach.
Conservatives hailed the decision as reversing a misinterpretation of Title IX.
“These particular agreements were changing the definitions of sex such that boys could self-identify into locker rooms, bathrooms and showers,” said Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel at the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. “The Trump administration is sending a strong message that Title IX is about protecting women and girls.”
In Delaware Valley, a 4,200-student district in northeast Pennsylvania, most transgender students weren’t using shared restrooms even under the OCR agreement, said Taylor James, executive director of TriVersity Pride Center, an LGBTQ+ community group and resource center based in Milford.
Fearful of backlash, he said, most students either used the restroom in the nurse’s office or just waited until they got home. But telling students they can’t use a restroom they feel comfortable in sends a message that there’s something wrong with them, James said.
Without the OCR agreement in place, James fears there won’t be any repercussions when teachers deliberately misgender students or when students face bullying because they don’t conform.
He’s working with legal aid groups on potential next steps, but his top priority is making sure students feel valued and cared for.
James said his biggest piece of advice to those students is to “just make it to adulthood, because you will be celebrated for the things you’ve been taught to hate about yourself.”
Many states still have laws protecting transgender students
Not all of the documents related to the affected districts are available in searches of the OCR’s public cases. The Education Department declined to make all the previous settlement agreements available or answer questions about which provisions would no longer be enforced.
But in the La Mesa-Spring Valley school district near San Diego, the revoked agreement involved allegations that a nonbinary student was bullied for continuing to use the restroom that matched their sex at birth — the very practice that the Trump administration wants to require.
And in the Sacramento Unified School District, the complaint didn’t relate to restrooms at all, according to local news reports . Federal investigators found that district officials responded promptly in 2022 after teachers didn’t use a transgender student’s preferred name and pronouns but failed to inform the student of their right to file a complaint.
Kayleigh Baker, a consultant with TNG Consulting and a member of the advisory board of the Association of Title IX Administrators, said she would recommend that institutions “wait just a second” if they’re considering policy changes based on the fact that the agreements have been rescinded.
Many states where the Education Department rescinded agreements, including California, Delaware and Washington, have laws protecting transgender students’ rights . Some school districts have had early court wins after pushing back against funding cuts related to Title IX. “We don’t want to rush to take away rights that they have.” “We shouldn’t rush to anticipatory complying with what we think the administration may do, because we have state law, we have all of these open questions,” Baker said. “And at the end of the day, we have very real students and employees who are trying to access their education, access their work environments, free from discrimination, and we don’t want to rush to take away rights that they have.”
Kristina Moon, senior attorney with the Education Law Center-Pennsylvania, stressed that federal laws and legal rulings, not OCR agreements, ultimately spell out what districts’ obligations are to LGBTQ+ students.
Some affected school districts, for example, are also under the jurisdiction of federal appeals court rulings that require schools to protect transgender students’ bathroom access .
“A fundamental concern is that our school boards and our school leaders are not understanding this distinction and feeling significant threats from the federal government, by design,” Moon said.
Parlato acknowledged that rescinding agreements is unusual and that courts haven’t yet consistently interpreted Title IX the way the Trump administration does. But she’s optimistic that will change in the next few years.
“Sex is an immutable characteristic, it can’t be changed, and once we can get that codified in law, we won’t have this issue,” she said.
Terminating agreements could undermine OCR’s credibility
The Education Department has also rescinded agreements that have nothing to do with transgender students.
Last year the Education Department withdrew a 2023 settlement in Forsyth, Georgia, in which the Office for Civil Rights had determined that book-ban discussions created a hostile environment for some students. The department also ended an agreement in Rapid City, South Dakota, that addressed mistreatment of Native American students . Throwing out agreements is “clearly going to reduce the credibility and authority of OCR.” Rescinding agreements tells students not to bother filing complaints, said Gellman-Beer, who led the OCR’s now-closed Philadelphia office before resigning last year. She also fears it will give school districts few incentives to work cooperatively with the OCR or comply with ongoing monitoring.
“It’s going to make it a thousand times more difficult to negotiate with a school district when they think they can just renegotiate with the next administration,” she said.
Throwing out agreements is “clearly going to reduce the credibility and authority of OCR,” Melnick said. At the same time, the more overtly politicized enforcement becomes, the more questions it raises about the validity of agreements. Melnick highlighted how the Trump administration threatened to withhold billions in federal research dollars to pressure universities to sign sweeping settlements of antisemitism claims.
“One administration should not be able to lock in a policy for the indefinite future regardless,” Melnick said.
Students bring complaints because they want their negative experience to lead to a meaningful change in their community, Baker said. Even students who agree with the current administration’s policies might wonder, “Who’s to stop that meaningful change from being undone the second there’s a change in power?”
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