DOE says Denver Public Schools violated Title IX with dual-sex bathrooms

The Denver Public Schools district violated Title IX protections by converting a single-sex, multi-stall restroom into what the district characterizes as an “all gender” facility, the Department of Education said Thursday. The district also violated Title IX by enacting LGBT policies that allow students to use private facilities conflicting with their biological sex, the DOE added. Federal officials started investigating the district in late January and released their findings on Thursday.

Why did the school change the bathrooms? The district redesignated a multi-stall women's restroom on the second floor of East High School into a dual-sex bathroom, the DOE said. The boys bathroom on the same floor remained exclusively male which put a burden on female students left with no private bathrooms. The school violated Title IX discrimination protections by denying women the right to equal educational facilities, the DOE concluded.

The district then tried to fix the alleged differential treatment by converting the second-floor boys bathroom into another “all gender” restroom, the DOE said. Making both bathrooms multi-sex doesn’t fix anything since males are still invading sensitive, all-female spaces, another Title IX violation, the DOE explained. The school received several complaints from female students who felt uncomfortable with the behavior of some boys in the bathrooms. Parents also shared concerns about the potential for sexual assault, as well as other general privacy concerns from the new policy.

What happens now? The district has 10 days to revert all multi-stall bathrooms back to their original a single-sex designation and rescind all policies allowing students to use bathrooms that don't align with their birth sex. The DOE also ordered the district to adopt biological definitions of male and female regarding all school policies, and issue a district-wide memo reiterating the importance of protecting the privacy and safety of students in single-sex spaces. The district will face imminent enforcement action should they reject these changes voluntarily, the DOE noted.

How has the district responded? District Superintendent Alex Marrero rejected the DOE’s claims that multi-stall, dual-sex bathrooms violate Title IX. The Trump administration is weaponizing Title IX to push an anti-transgender agenda, he said in a Friday statement. Marrero alleged that investigators never conducted an on-site review or interviewed witnesses, adding that all of the district's requests for mediation and policy compromises went unanswered. In regards to the administration's requested changes, the superintendent insisted that the district would not stand for any attempts to, as he characterized it, erase LGBT students.

Dig deeper: Read Elizabeth Russell’s report on a similar DOE investigation into bathrooms at a school district in Virginia.