Parents who object that trans bathroom policies endanger their daughters are dismissed as 'transphobic.' But parental warnings have been tragically borne out.
The superintendent of the City Schools of Decatur, a district of metropolitan Atlanta, secretly instituted a gender identity policy in 2016 allowing students of both sexes to enter any bathroom they chose. In November 2017, a kindergarten girl was allegedly sexually assaulted in her Decatur school bathroom by a boy who was allowed to be there because of that policy.
After reporting the assault to district officials but getting little response, the girl’s mother, Pascha Thomas, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). OCR’s recently released findings illustrate the dangers and deception inherent in maintaining trans-promoting school policies that defy scientific reality and common sense.
On June 19, 2020, OCR concluded that the Decatur school district had violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by failing to investigate and respond appropriately to Thomas’ sexual assault complaint. OCR’s findings reveal school officials were so deeply invested in transgender ideology, they failed to investigate the assault, tried to sweep the problem under the rug, and actively misled local parents about what had happened and what it meant for their children’s safety.
Under Title IX, a school district must investigate all claims of sex discrimination, including sexual harassment and assault, in its schools. This duty is non-delegable. In other words, the district can’t push it off on some other entity and wash its hands of the matter. But, as OCR found, this is exactly what the district had done.
A Flimsy Investigation
Rather than investigate the complaint, the district notified the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) and the police via the school resource officer. But DFCS’s legal mandate is to investigate child abuse and neglect in the context of caregivers, not schools.
So DFCS limited its inquiry to investigating and dismissing the school’s allegations that the victim’s mother provided inadequate supervision — a shameful attempt by educrats to deflect attention from the school assault. The police also immediately declined to pursue an assault case because of the ages of the children involved.
This was the extent of the investigation the victim received. As OCR found, “The District then took no further steps to determine what occurred” and “failed to ascertain anything about DFCS’s findings concerning the alleged incident.” Nor did it even notify Thomas about the outcome of...