Denver Public Schools has not complied with the Trump administration’s request that the district convert all multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms in its schools into separate facilities for female and male students by the agency’s Monday deadline.
In a five-page response dated Sunday, DPS general counsel Kristin Bailey accused the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights of “intransigence,” a failure to adequately communicate and a “startling” lack of clarity surrounding the alleged Title IX violation levied against the school district.
“We write to rebut the stated presumption that the District and the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) are at an impasse,” Bailey wrote. “We are not. In fact, as the District has shared throughout this Directed Investigation, we want to discuss resolution options with OCR, and at this stage, the District remains interested in doing so.”
Education Department representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Denver Post on Monday.
On Aug. 28, the Education Department announced that it had found DPS discriminated against girls by creating a gender-neutral bathroom at East High School and by adopting a districtwide policy allowing students to use facilities corresponding with their gender identities.
DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero issued a statement the following day, vowing to protect Denver students and families from an administration hostile to the LGBTQ community.
The department’s Office of Civil Rights said DPS’s all-gender restrooms violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, enacted to allow girls and women to participate in educational activities in school, including sports, without sexual harassment.
The office gave the district 10 days to agree to a proposed resolution — which included converting all-gender restrooms back to single-sex facilities — or “risk imminent enforcement action.”
The findings come after the Education Department announced in January that it was investigating DPS over the East High’s conversion of a girls restroom into a bathroom for all genders last academic year.
The Denver high school created the gender-neutral bathroom at the request of students who wanted another facility, choosing to convert a girls bathroom because it was more cost-effective, district officials said.
The all-gender bathroom has stalls that offer more privacy than other facilities, with 12-foot walls that nearly reach the ceiling and metal blocks that prevent people from seeing through.
In response to the January investigation, East High recently renovated a boys bathroom into a second all-gender restroom — a move the district said it made to address any disparity. The district has two other all-gender facilities, at the Denver School of the Arts and the Career Education Center Early College.
In the federal agency’s letter alleging DPS violated Title IX, the Education Department also said the Denver district created “a hostile environment for its students by endangering their safety, privacy and dignity” through its use of all-gender restrooms.
The Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to cut K-12 and higher education funding from schools with policies that the federal government calls discriminatory, particularly those that relate to gender identity, the LGBTQ community and race.
Bailey argued in Sunday’s response that the Office of Civil Rights failed to articulate what about the gender-neutral restrooms constituted a Title IX violation and what possible remedies existed despite multiple requests by the district for further discussion.
The accusation of a “hostile environment,” Bailey wrote, was new.
“This new and different allegation has never been discussed and raises a host of new questions in addition to those that have been unanswered throughout the process thus far,” Bailey wrote. “If OCR can provide a more precise articulation, based in fact, of the reasons it purports to have sufficient evidence to support a legal conclusion that the bathroom created a hostile environment, it may prompt an appropriate resolution to this matter.”
The district requested to engage in a 90-day resolution negotiation period.
Get more Colorado news by signing up for our Mile High Roundup email newsletter.
Originally Published:
