The U.S. Department of Education is investigating four Kansas school districts after a right-wing nonprofit complained about their policies allowing teachers to maintain confidentiality with transgender students.
Topeka, Shawnee Mission, Olathe and Kansas City, Kansas, public school districts are under investigation for potentially violating Title IX and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, the department said in a Thursday press release.
The education secretary, Linda McMahon, said the districts’ alleged violations are an affront to the law and educational leadership.
“School personnel should not confuse and unsettle young girls by forcing them to share sex-separated sports and intimate facilities with boys,” McMahon said, “nor should school personnel abuse their position of authority by hiding sensitive information pertaining to a child’s health and wellbeing from that child’s parents.”
She vowed a vigorous investigation into the four districts.
Those school districts allegedly allow students to participate in sports and use restrooms and locker rooms based on gender identity instead of biological sex, said the initial complaint from the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies, a conservative nonprofit founded by two former Trump administration officials. Kansas law already prohibits transgender and cisgender girls from playing sports together and bans transgender girls from school locker rooms and bathrooms.
The district policies under investigation also allow educators to maintain confidentiality with transgender students, which in some cases means not disclosing a student’s gender identity to their parents without the student’s consent.
In a 35-page complaint detailing the districts’ gender identity practices and policies, the institute encouraged the federal department to pull funding from the districts, listing court decisions, a January presidential executive order, federal law and state law as justification.
The institute alleges Shawnee Mission, Topeka and Kansas City, Kansas, districts violated Title IX “by forcing students to share intimate facilities with members of the opposite sex as a condition of participation in their education programs and activities,” the complaint said. It argues that the districts’ gender identity policies “erase” sex.
All four schools, the complaint argues, are allegedly in violation of FERPA, which prohibits districts from preventing parental access to student educational records.
The districts “are undermining parents’ rights to access their children’s educational records and appear to be distributing the information contained therein to employees with no legitimate educational interest in these records without parental consent,” the complaint said.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach wrote a letter to McMahon in June, urging the department to investigate. He said in a Thursday announcement that Title IX was created to safeguard girls’ equal educational opportunities.
Kobach had previously sent letters to six Kansas school districts in 2023, criticizing gender identity policies and practices.
“It would be arrogant beyond belief to hide something with such weighty consequences from the very people (parents) that both law and nature vest with providing for a child’s long-term well-being,” he wrote in the December 2023 letter. “That a Kansas school district could so cavalierly allow a minor child—whom science tells us does not even have a fully formed brain until into his or her twenties—to decide whether his or her parents know about such things is shockingly irresponsible.”
Two school districts reportedly modified their policies, Kobach said, but four did not. Those four districts are the subject of the recent complaint.
Kobach also sued the Biden administration in federal court in 2024 to challenge new rules that strengthened antidiscrimination protections for LGBTQ+ students and expanded the definition of sexual harassment at colleges and schools. A federal judge eventually blocked the rules from taking effect in Kansas.
“I am grateful that we now have a federal government that takes Title IX seriously and will ensure that school districts follow the law,” Kobach said.
Title IX is enforced by the federal department’s Office of Civil Rights and FERPA is enforced by the department’s Student Privacy Policy Office.
Senate Minority Leader Dinah Sykes, a Lenexa Democrat, said in a statement the investigation and complaint illustrate “how out of touch Republicans are with reality and with what is happening in our school buildings.”
“These vague, unspecified claims are a witch hunt and a distraction from providing a world-class education,” said Sykes, whose Senate district sits within the Shawnee Mission school district.
She said the investigations are a distraction “from the real issues that are impacting our students right now,” including access to mental and physical health care, food access for families and school funding threats.
This story was originally published by the Kansas Reflector.
