Denver Public Schools is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for “discriminating against its female students” after the district turned a women’s lavatory into an all-gender facility, the office said Tuesday.
With almost 2,000 pupils, East High School now has “exclusive restroom for male students and no restroom for female students on its second floor,” the office claims, following the building of the facility.
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement that the disturbing revelation that the Denver Public Schools District denied female pupils a restroom on par with those of their male counterparts seems to clearly violate the District’s female students’ civil rights. To be clear, we are in a new period in America, and OCR will not accept any form of discrimination under President Trump.
As a possible violation of Title IX, which the district is bound by as a recipient of federal financial assistance from the Department of Education, Trainor wrote in a letter to the district’s superintendent that the investigation will look into whether Denver Public Schools discriminated against students based on their sex by installing the all-gender restroom.
The letter also references reports from local NBC affiliate KUSA that the district had erected two additional multistall all-gender restrooms at CEC Early College and the Denver School of the Arts.
According to a statement from Denver Public Schools, it is unprecedented for the Office for Civil Rights to voluntarily launch its own inquiry into a single restroom in reaction to local media attention rather than a complaint that was made asking for their assistance.
According to the district, a “student-led process” led to the addition of the restroom in order to accommodate “all students, including those who may feel uncomfortable in gender-specific facilities.”
The high school faculty has devised a strategy to “supervise and monitor” the all-gender restroom, which features stalls with 12-foot-tall dividers, “just as they do with all others,” the district said.
The school district explained in a message to local parents before the restroom’s opening that the second-loor women’s restroom was chosen for the conversion because more “structural makeup” in the men’s restroom, such as urinals, would have needed to be removed and would have increased expenses “outside of the construction budget.”
The district also stated that the choice to make the men’s restroom an all-gender facility would be taken into consideration if it were to get more financing.
The district has advised those who are uncomfortable utilizing the new all-gender facility to use the single-stall restroom on the second floor or a restroom on a separate floor.
In the letter, Trainor stated that the opening of the probe is “not itself evidence of wrongdoing” and that this week, requests for “access to data and personnel” will be made.
Since President Donald Trump started his second term last week, there have been significant changes, including executive orders that target “gender ideology,” government DEI programs, transition-related medical treatment for children, and transgender military service. The Office for Civil Rights’ probe comes after these developments.
Employee resource organizations have also been impacted by Trump’s anti-DEI executive order. For example, DOJ Pride, an LGBTQ employee assistance group at the Department of Justice, shut down on Wednesday.