Arlington Public Schools Say "No," Refuse To Comply With Anti-Trans State Policy

Last week, Governor Glen Youngkin approved an anti-trans model school board policy that bans trans people from bathrooms, forcibly outs them. Arlington Public Schools announced it will not comply.

In a disheartening move last week, Virginia Governor Glen Youngkin finalized discriminatory policies towards transgender students in the state by approving a controversial model policy for school boards. The model policy, a significant step back in the protections for trans students, drastically curtails their rights when in public schools. The original policy was released in 2022 to outcry from several school districts and civil rights defenders, and was required to go through a long period of public comment before being finalized. Thousands of students walked out of schools in protest and over 70,000 public comments were submitted, most against the measure. In response to the now-approved model policies, Arlington Public Schools, one of the state's most prominent districts, has responded with outright refusal. They have pledged to reject the policies and to continue their defense of the civil rights of their transgender students.

The model policies are extreme - they would place Virginia in line with states such as Florida, Arkansas, and Alabama which all have Republican supermajorities and which have been known for passing the harshest anti-trans laws. Here is a map of states from the Movement Advancement Project showing states with bathroom bans similar to the new Virginia model policies, for example:

Movement Advancement Project bathroom ban map, July 2023.

The model policies bar trans people from school sports, bathrooms, and ban affirming teachers from using many trans students pronouns. Similar laws were proposed in Virginia this year, including a sports ban and a forced outing law. These laws all failed in the Virginia legislature.

Some of the new and finalized model policies can be seen here:

Sample of some of the newly released Virginia model policies

The policies, if enacted by schools, would:

• Mandate that teachers misgender trans students unless they have parental permission.

• Mandate trans students use the wrong restroom by stating that trans students have to use restrooms of their “biological sex.”

• Forcibly out trans students to parents by mandating schools cannot “conceal information” about gender from parents.

• Violate student-counselor privacy by forcing counselors to get parental consent before speaking about gender identity with a student.

• Ban trans students from sports, a policy explicitly rejected by the Virginia legislature.

These policies stem from a law enacted in 2020, which tasked the state board of education with the creation of model policies on transgender student inclusion. The law was conceived with the intent of protecting transgender students’ rights in schools and were used to that effect by Governor Ralph Northam at the time. However, Governor Youngkin has manipulated its original purpose by inserting discriminatory measures into this law, bypassing the checks and balances typically provided by the state legislature. This deviation from the law's intended purpose starkly contrasts with the anti-discriminatory purpose it was designed to promote.

As a result, Arlington Public Schools has outright rejected the policy, declaring itself the first school district in the state to do so. The superintendent, Dr. Francisco Durán, stated in a letter, “We have reviewed the model policies and determined that our current policies and policy implementation procedures that protect the rights of our transgender students will stay as is.”

You can see the full response from Arlington Public Schools here:

Response to model policies in Virginia by Arlington Public Schools.

Arlington Public Schools does not stand alone in its defiance of the new state policies, although it is the only school district to outright reject the latest draft. Earlier last year, when the policies were first released (but before they were finalized), other school districts reacted with similar rejections. Richmond Public Schools similarly stated, “we reject Governor Youngkin’s model policies” when the first draft was released last year. Falls Church and Alexandria also released similar letters stating that they would reject the policies as well. Fairfax County, when reacting to the current and finalized policy, did not commit to adopting them either, stating instead, “We believe our current FCPS policies are consistent with federal and state anti-discrimination laws.”

Moving forward, it is unclear what, if anything, Governor Youngkin can do to force schools to comply with the policies. There are no penalties for noncompliance set out in state law, and no clear way that the Governor can enforce them. They are likely to come under challenge, with transgender Delegate Danica Roem stating during the first draft release last fall that they likely violate Virginia’s Human Rights act. Moving forward, Virginia residents will be watching closely to see if their own schools adopt the new policies, or explicitly reject them in a similar fashion to Arlington Public Schools.