The Fairfax County School board voted to include sexual orientation and later gender identity to its nondiscrimination guide within the Students Rights & Responsibilities handbook about a year and a half ago. That means up until the start of last school year it wasn’t against FCPS policy to openly discriminate against a student, staff member or job applicant who is not heterosexual and/or gender nonconforming. It is great that this policy was passed. I am a huge advocate for the LGBT community, but I feel that this ruling did more harm than good.
The school board is being criticized for the process of approving the policy to be rushed. The new policy protecting gender nonconforming people was passed only two months after the Virginia Attorney General issued an opinion allowing school boards to expand protections to transgender people.
“[It took] 10 years of study to institute later high school start times,” school board member Patty Reed said, who abstained from voting on adding the new policy to the SR&R handbook.
“After we pass this policy tonight, nothing will change in how we handle cases of transgender and gender nonconforming students and employees,” school board member Ryan McElveen said at the school board meeting where the anti-discrimination towards gender nonconforming people was being passed.
It was entirely unnecessary to rush the passing of the new policy because, according to McElveen, nothing will change. By rushing the passing of this new policy, the school board garnered more negative attention than positive.
“This board has never received a concern regarding a bathroom incident,” McElveen said at the same school board meeting. “We have never received a concern about a transgender staff member. And we have never received a concern about a transgender student playing on a sports team. Never.”
If the school board never had an issue involving any transgender school member then why was it necessary to rush the policy passing? It wasn’t. It’s one thing if schools had issues involving discrimination, but according to McElveen, there was none. There was no legitimate reason for the policy to have been rushed.
In December of last year, an unnamed student and the head of the Traditional Values Coalition filed a suit against the school board for overstepping its bounds when it changed the policy to bar discrimination of students and staff based on their gender identity or sexual orientation.
I think that FCPS did a good job in protecting individuals who fall under the LGBT umbrella, but they did overstep their bounds by rushing the new policy. If the passing of the new policy wasn’t rushed then the suit wouldn’t have been filed.
By rushing the implementation of this bill into the SR&R policy, the school board negatively affected the quality of an extremely important step forward in equality. The school board should have waited until they could properly introduce the proposed changes and heard opinions from the community about the changes before full on voting on the issue.