Trustees for Keller ISD passed two policy updates on Wednesday that one left-leaning advocacy organization claims violate federal law.
At the school board’s meeting on June 28, trustees moved to require students, faculty, and staff to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex at birth and prohibit district employees from promoting or requiring pronoun usage “inconsistent with an individual’s biological sex as it appears on the individual’s birth certificate.”
During the public comment component of the meeting before the vote, more than 50 registered speakers voiced their support or opposition to the proposed policy changes.
“These policies protect bullies and will embolden their hate,” claimed Keller ISD alum Cynthia Cutler, reported KERA. “So many of you here speak of protecting children, yet seem so eager to leave our most vulnerable and at-risk kids behind.”
However, not everyone at the meeting shared Cutler’s perspective. Keller ISD parent Ashley Hine told WFAA, “Our children have been punished at school for not calling kids by other pronouns, which I think is crazy. We were taught English grammar. You don’t get to just create your own adjectives or your own pronouns.”
Before Wednesday’s vote, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas sent Keller ISD’s school board members and superintendent a letter outlining how the new policies would run afoul of state and federal law.
“Refusing to use a student’s affirming pronouns can trigger significant legal liability for school districts under the Constitution and Title IX,” the ACLU of Texas claimed, raising the issue of government-compelled speech.
The organization further claimed that the new bathroom policy was unduly invasive and a violation of students’ privacy.
“School districts have no right to question students’ sexual characteristics such as genitalia, hormones, internal anatomy, or chromosomes or to review outdated legal and medical documents that may reveal private medical information,” the ACLU of Texas wrote.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the advocacy group targeted Keller ISD last year over its trustees’ adoption of a policy that instituted content guidelines that regulated students’ exposure to potentially controversial or sexually explicit topics in library books and other instructional resources.
The ACLU of Texas filed a complaint against the school district with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, claiming the district was engaging in “unlawful sex discrimination against transgender, non-binary, gender diverse, and intersex students” by instituting such guidelines.
Other school districts in North Texas have also moved to prohibit controversial subject matter from being taught or made available to students. However, some districts have largely chosen not to act on such issues. Dallas ISD, for instance, has not acted to remove several books from library shelves identified by some concerned parents as inappropriate because of alleged sexually explicit content or endorsements of critical race theory, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Still, the policies advanced by Keller ISD’s board of trustees earlier this week proved popular with community members that said they believed the school system and its curricula had become politicized over the years.
“The argument over the use of pronouns at school is ridiculous and an attempt by the woke to push their narrative on others,” said Jennifer Matchett, according to KERA. “It’s an attempt to get attention focused on one group of people at the expense of another.”