In refusing to follow federal law, schools leaders in Arlington and Fairfax counties continue to show they care more about advancing a radical pro-LGBT agenda than about their students’ safety.
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) and Arlington Public Schools (APS) have filed separate lawsuits against the Department of Education (DOE) after the federal agency found that the districts, as well as three other Northern Virginia school districts, had violated Title IX and moved to freeze federal funding.
On July 25, DOE’s Office of Civil Rights concluded its investigation into the five districts, which are Alexandria City Public Schools, APS, FCPS, Loudon County Public Schools, and Prince William County Public Schools. The agency determined that each district had violated Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by permitting students to access bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identity rather than their sex.
The districts were given time to correct their policies but refused.
On August 19, DOE announced that it was moving to halt federal funding to the school districts. DOE also stated that it was placing the districts on “reimbursement status,” which requires them to pay their own expenses before requesting reimbursement from DOE. Finally, DOE designated them as “high risk” in the federal grant system, harming their ability to secure federal grant funding.
However, rather than comply with DOE’s demands that they honor Title IX by maintaining separate bathroom and locker room facilities for male and female students, FCPS and APS opted to sue.
Their lawsuits portray DOE as unfairly stripping funding, claiming that the districts are in compliance with Title IX and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s decision in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, which requires schools to allow students to use intimate facilities according to their gender identity.
What the districts, and most media coverage, fails to note, however, is that there is a circuit split on this issue. In 2023, the 11th Circuit ruled that schools have the right and responsibility to maintain locker rooms and bathrooms separated by sex rather than gender identity.
What’s more, when the Biden administration rewrote Title IX to include gender identity and allow boys in girl’s private spaces, courts across the nation halted the effort as contrary to Congress’s original intent. The Supreme Court refused the administration’s request to lift those injunctions, and the rewrite was ultimately scrapped by the Trump administration.
In response, FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid and APS Superintendent Dr. Francisco Durán attempted to portray DOE’s actions as depriving vulnerable children of food and services.
Durán stated, “APS has a duty to our community of students, families and educators to defend the resources they deserve, and policies designed to protect students of all backgrounds. Students are punished when federal funding, primarily used to provide free breakfast and lunch for over 8,000 students or counseling and education for special needs students, is ripped away.”
He further claimed that DOE is the one violating the law, saying,
“We strongly disagree with the U.S. DOE’s assertion that our policy violates Title IX. Current APS policy adheres to state and federal law. The U.S. DOE is demanding we violate those laws and, in our view, following the law is not optional. We will continue to uphold and advocate for policies that reflect our values and support the academic and social-emotional well-being of every child.”
DOE Secretary Linda McMahon saw the issue differently. She wrote on X, “It’s disturbing that these Virginia school division leaders are fighting harder to keep boys in girls’ sports and bathrooms than they are to improve outcomes for students. The Trump Administration will proudly stand for commonsense and protect our young girls. See you in Court.”
The five districts are no strangers to prioritizing gender ideology over parental concerns. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, R, rose to office largely because of voter backlash against policies allowing students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on gender identity.
In July 2023, Youngkin’s Virginia Department of Education issued model policies requiring school districts to maintain sex-specific bathrooms and locker rooms, to ensure sports teams are separated by sex, and to defer to parents on their children’s health issues rather than hiding a child’s claimed transgender status.
Districts like FCPS and Prince William County quickly and openly defied those requirements, and all five districts have continued to allow students to use intimate facilities according to gender identity.
They did this despite the fact that a number of violent and disturbing incidents involving transgenders have taken place in school bathrooms.
In 2021 a male student wearing a skirt was permitted to use the women’s bathroom at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County, where he raped a female student. When the girl’s father attempted to speak about the incident at a school board meeting, he was arrested. Then-Superintendent Scott Ziegler engaged in a criminal coverup, claiming no sexual assaults had occurred.
The male student was quietly transferred to Broad Run High School without staff being notified. He went on to sexually assault another female student there.
Despite these horrors, and student walkouts demanding sex-separated bathrooms, Loudoun has continued its policy.
More recently, Loudoun punished male students after they expressed that they were uncomfortable that a female student who identifies as a male was in the locker room and videorecording them. In response, the district suspended the boys for “sexual harassment” and issued no-contact orders, effectively silencing them. One parent eventually moved her son out of state. The girl was not punished, even though it is against school policy to record other students in private spaces.
Arlington’s policies have also enabled sex crimes to take place in female-only spaces.
In September 2024, a mother and her nine-year-old daughter walked into the women’s locker room at Washington Liberty High School in Arlington and found a naked man facing the door. The man, Richard Kenneth Cox, identifies as transgender but is also a convicted child sex offender.
The mother reported the incident but was told that Cox had been using the women’s facilities all summer. Despite her complaints to school officials, Cox continued using the school’s women’s locker room into October.
The mother said this about her daughter’s trauma:
“I felt sort of trapped. I felt like in my head, my priority was [to] get my daughter changed out of her wet clothes, and I wasn’t sure where else to go, so I took her over to the corner of the room, covered her with a towel, changed her as quickly as I could, and we left, and we left the facility as fast as we could. We sat in the car for a bit after and she talked about how she just couldn’t stop seeing it, and that I felt terrible for her. She’s never seen that before, and definitely not in a place that she felt was safe for her to change in.”
Meanwhile, FCPS is embroiled in another controversy in which school staff are accused of taking female students to receive abortions without telling their parents.
This isn’t hard: All these school districts need to do is follow the law.
But they refuse to do so.
The DOE’s only recourse is to withhold funding — and no, it’s not being done to starve children, as the head of FCPS and APS claim.
And the amount the federal government is threatening to withhold is miniscule within the context of massive district budgets.
FCPS stands to potentially lose $167 million, or 4.7 percent of its total 3.7 billion budget, while APS is facing a 2.7 percent cut, or $23 million, of an $826.2 million budget.
If these districts look over their books for extraneous and wasteful spending and decide the best thing to do is to cut breakfast and lunch subsidies for students, that’s on them.
Despite their efforts to portray the DOE as heartless, these woke school districts continue their longstanding fight for the rights of sexual predators and confused boys to invade the private spaces of young girls.
In 2023 when Loudoun County students held a school walkout, the students highlighted their discomfort in being forced to share bathrooms and lockers rooms with someone of the opposite sex. Some of these students expressed that they don’t use the bathroom for the entire school day out of fear of being attacked or having to be exposed to a person of the opposite sex.
Their fears are realistic. That nine-year-old girl in Arlington had her innocence stolen from her because the school gave a known pervert open access to the locker rooms, where he routinely exposed himself to little girls just trying to go to swim lessons.
Not one but two Loudoun County female students will forever be traumatized because a boy claiming to be a girl raped them, only to find themselves further traumatized when district officials tried to cover up the crimes in order to protect themselves and their transgender-friendly policies.
And now these school districts are willing to waste local taxpayer dollars on a court fight in hopes of maintaining the same insane policies that allowed such horrors to happen in the first place.
How many more must be harmed before the basic right to privacy and safety is honored? If the courts don’t act and leave it up to these district leaders, the numbers will be untold.
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