BOYERTOWN >> Three high school students have been added to a federal lawsuit against the Boyertown Area School District over its bathroom and locker room policy for transgender students, the Alliance Defending Freedom and Independence Law Center announced Tuesday.
Attorneys with the Independence Law Center filed an amended complaint in the case Tuesday to add the new students to the suit.
“Schools shouldn’t be robbing students of their legally protected personal privacy,” said Randall Wenger, chief counsel for the Independence Law Center, in a statement. “The children joining with the original student who filed this suit shouldn’t be forced into emotionally vulnerable situations like this when they are in the care of their schools. It’s a school’s duty to protect and respect the bodily privacy and dignity of all students. In this case, school officials are clearly ignoring that duty.”
The lawsuit was originally filed last month by the parents of an unidentified 11th-grade male student who objected after seeing a female who identifies as a male undressing in the high school boys locker room.
The Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based conservative Christian organization, is co-counseling the student and his family in the suit, along with the Independence Law Center, a Pennsylvania-based pro-bono legal organization dedicated to advancing civil rights.
Two weeks ago, the American Civil Liberties Union joined the legal dispute on the school district’s side. Reggi Shuford, executive director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a statement at the time the district “did the right thing in affirming and respecting their students’ gender identity.”
The ACLU, both the national and Pennsylvania chapters, intervened on behalf of another Boyertown student, Aidan DeStefano, a transgender student who asserts the reversal of the current policy would be harmful.
The ACLU’s intervention is also on behalf of the Pennsylvania Youth Congress.
“Transgender students just want what everyone else wants, to be accepted for who we are,” DeStefano said in a press release from the ACLU. “Reversing the practices that have allowed me and other trans kids to thrive at school would be devastating.”
In its brief, the ACLU argued “Plaintiff asks this Court to order the School District to prohibit transgender boys from continuing to use the boys’ facilities. Because they can’t possibly use the girls’ facilities any more than other boys could be expected to do so, if Plaintiff were to prevail, transgender students would be excluded from the facilities used by all other students and forced to use separate facilities that other students may choose to use, but no other student is required to use.”
Doing so “would send the powerfully stigmatizing message to transgender students – and all other students – that there is something so wrong with transgender students that their mere presence in the facilities used by their peers is unacceptable,” the ACLU argued.
At its March 28 meeting, the Boyertown Area School Board voted 6-3 to reject a proposal from Joel Doe’s lawyers who offered to drop the suit if the district agreed to alter its policy to comply with four demands.
The demands the board rejected would have the district declare that all bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing areas accessible to multiple people at the same time are to be designated for use based on biological/anatomical sex only. And that no person, unless they are a member of that sex, may enter those multi-user areas. Any single-use facility such as a bathroom may be used by persons of either sex.
The school district issued an announcement on Wednesday, March 29, recognizing the audience for listening to one another and sharing their opinions with the board.
“Our community demonstrated that we can have disagreements – even sharp disagreements – over a highly controversial subject, but, hopefully, we can also agree that no single issue is so great that it will ever divide us, and distract us from our mission of providing the very best education to every one of our students,” Superintendent Richard Faidley wrote in the district’s announcement.
The district will continue to provide updates regarding this lawsuit through its website and at future meetings.
The case in Boyertown is the second in Pennsylvania dealing with the subject of transgender rights. In Western Pennsylvania, three transgender students are suing the Pine-Richland School District to allow them to use the bathrooms they want, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
School districts across our area are operating under a wait and see policy in response to the suits.
During a recent Spring-Ford Area School Board meeting, the lawsuit in Boyertown and the issues with which it wrestles were a topic of discussion. That board took the advice of Solicitor Mark Fitzgerald and the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, and decided to wait for a legal ruling before making any decisions.
The board policy committee has a draft on transgender students its been working on but has had to shelve it for the mean time, Assistant Superintendent Allyn Roche said. The policy addresses transgender access to locker rooms and bathrooms among other things.
“It’s on our agenda every month for us to talk about,” he said. “But with the unsure court cases, we’re really not ready to make a line in the sand at this time. We’re waiting there. So we do have a draft.”
Last spring, the Pottsgrove School Board’s policy committee made moves to address the issue in the wake of former President Obama’s issuing of guidance on how schools should handle transgender bathroom and locker room issues in the wake of a restrictive law in North Carolina which was just reversed this week.
Since the Boyertown lawsuit made headlines, the matter was raised on a Pottsgrove discussion page on Facebook.
On March 23, Pottsgrove School Board member Rick Rabinowitz, who manages the page, responded to questions and opinions by writing, “when it comes to this issue, the above debate illustrates the complexity and difficulty schools will have in coming up with a policy that works for everyone. Just because we have not yet done so does not mean that we have not been and are not being proactive.”
Rabinowitz further wrote, “the Boyertown case illustrates, to me, that hastiness is not always the right way to go. Each of our personal views on this matter may be different, but our first obligation is to comply with the law, and that law is a moving target right now. Our second obligation is to avoid decisions that might expose us (and thus the taxpayers) to costly legal cases and our equal obligation to that is to the students whether they are or are not transgender. We are taking our time to get this right.”
Digital First Media staff writers Evan Brandt and Rebecca Blanchard contributed to this report.
