The Education Department offered the school district a 10-day window to voluntarily make changes or risk unspecified enforcement action.
The Education Department said on Thursday that Denver Public Schools violated Title IX, the law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in schools, by converting sex-separated restrooms into “all-gender” facilities.
The department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) also found that the school district violated the law by allowing students to use intimate facilities matching their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
The finding followed an OCR investigation into Denver’s East High School earlier this year after it converted a girls’ restroom into a multi-stall all-gender facility. The agency said the school had an exclusive restroom for males on its second floor but none for females.
The school district has said that the all-gender lavatory, which has 12-foot partitions between stalls, was created as the result of a student-led process.
The school district later created a second all-gender restroom on the same floor as the first.
However, OCR said the district’s actions did not resolve its Title IX violation “because males are still allowed to invade sensitive female-only facilities.” The agency cited a complaint from a female student who said that “boys kept staring at her, looking her up and down, kind of taunting her” when using the bathroom, which left her “very uncomfortable.”
Another complainant alleged that a male teacher frequently entered the restroom “to check on things,” which made female students uncomfortable and raised privacy concerns, according to the agency.
“Denver is free to endorse a self-defeating gender ideology, but it is not free to accept federal taxpayer funds and harm its students in violation of Title IX,” acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor stated, noting that the district had created “a hostile environment” for its students by endangering their safety and privacy.
OCR offered the school district a 10-day window to voluntarily make changes or risk enforcement action, though it did not specify what actions could be taken in the event of noncompliance.
The school district is required within that timeframe to convert all gender-neutral restrooms back to sex-designated restrooms and rescind any policies that allowed access to facilities based on gender identity.
OCR also directed the school district to adopt biology-based definitions for the words “male” and “female” in all Title IX-related policies and practices, according to its statement.
