PERKIOMEN — The Perkiomen Valley School Board voted 6-3 to retire the controversial trans bathroom policy that has dominated the headlines in recent months and to “direct the policy committee to develop revised policy language.”
Those voting Feb. 12 in opposition to removing “policy 720,” as it is known, are the three remaining board members from the previous majority — Jason Saylor, Rowan Keenan and Don Fountain — that changed after the November elections.
Voting in favor of retiring the policy were school board President Laura White, Vice President Todd McKinney, and members Robert Liggett, Treena Sadler and Tammi Campli.
As has been the case during discussions at previous meetings, the subject consumed the majority of the meeting and featured impassioned appeals from both members of the audience and members of the board.
The vote removes the rule allowing only sex at birth to determine who is permitted to use the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. Until, or if, a replacement policy is crafted by the policy committee, the guiding policy will revert to policy 103, the discrimination policy, and to an administrative rule which has changed since it was last aired at the last policy committee meeting, but which does not require school board approval.
Both sides of the debate have suggested the other encourages discrimination.
Those supporting keeping policy 720 argue that it discriminates against cisgender women by robbing them of a safe space in the girls’ room, while those supporting the removal of policy 720 argue it discriminates against transgender males and transgender females by keeping them out of the bathroom they feel comfortable using.
Both sides of the debate have accused their opposites of bullying and intimidation and both sides have argued that the law is on their side, or soon will be.
In some ways, the students of the district are caught in the crossfire, as student school board member Claire Tremba made evident as the board debate neared its conclusion.
Responding to repeated calls for polling or surveying the students to find out what kind of policy they favor, Tremba said “It’s not as simple as sending out a survey or a poll because those record emails and IP addresses and many students don’t feel comfortable being attached to their voice. It’s sad but it’s the truth,” she said.
“The consensus I’ve seen among the students says this issue has become convoluted with political agendas and has gotten away from what the truth of what policy 720 is about. It’s not about policy anymore,” she said. “We’re now on the news over our school board meetings instead of our student section. People are sending bomb threats and we’re scared for our life in class over going to the bathroom.”
Tremba defended the district administration’s handling of the matter as the issue has roiled the community. When speaking to the student body, she said the administration “has preached kindness and that if you disagree, disagree respectfully.” But students still find it difficult to speak out because of the positions people have taken and recriminations and blowback against those who speak out. “Hearing someone’s voice is not checking a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ box on a Google form.”
Former school board president Jason Saylor, who introduced the policy last year and Monday said he lifted the working from the Central Bucks School District and edited it somewhat, said he introduced it because he asked about how a situation like this would have been handled “and I was lied to by the administration.”
Saylor said after the vote that he accepted the board’s decision. However, he said, a change in case law or Title 9 wording may well have him re-visit the subject.
He said the district should have “50 to 60 Title 9 violations” for many kinds of discrimination.
“So in the end, what are we doing? The federal government clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing on this. The courts are all over the place because there is vagueness in these policies,” Saylor said. “If someone is going to sue us for a Title 9 violation, so be it, but we shouldn’t get caught in the emotional aspect of this.”
He highlighted what he sees as cracks in the majority’s reasoning by pointing to Muslim or Jewish students whose religion might not allow them to remove a head covering in the presence of a male and so might be unable to use the bathroom because a biological male is in there. “So we’re willing to discriminate just a smidge,” he said. “We’re saying this identifiable trait is more important than other identifiable traits.”
Keenan similarly chided the board majority for what he said is a contradiction; not being willing to carry the cause of trans rights all the way and apply it to athletics and locker rooms.
“It seems crazy to me that you support the trans agenda with bathrooms, but not in locker rooms,” said Keenan. “It you accept it at all, you have to accept it 100 percent. If you accept the ideology to push it on the world, a trans woman is a trans woman and there is no exception.”
The result of the vote “is the same as discriminating against women, but we’re discriminating against 500 women instead of five transgenders,” Keenan said. Changing who can use the boy’s and girl’s room “means all the rules of common sense that we were brought up with but now are being thrown out the window because of an issue with definitions; definitions which contradict basic biology and things we cannot change out ourselves and our world.”
White said “policy 720 “wasn’t in place before October and it was initiated without the input of the policy committee and put in place when there was not really a problem to solve.”
The concerns raised repeatedly by parents, about what will happen in the bathrooms, are more issues of behavior than policy, White argued.
“It’s behavior that needs to be the focus. If the students in our bathrooms are not willing to follow the protocol, that needs to be addressed,” she said. “So why is this behavior all of the sudden an issue? There is a line between what you’re arguing for and the perception of a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Board member Robert Liggett said his decision is based on the law as it now stands and was explained to the board and the public by District Solicitor Brian Subers. He has said the legal guidance that applies is the decision of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Doe vs. Boyertown which found the district’s policy of allowing trans students in the facility matching the gender with which they identify does not violate the privacy rights of the cisgender girls or boys.
“With such clarity, in my opinion, it becomes our obligation as a board to follow federal law which has, at this point, been explained to us through Doe Vs. Boyertown and we should align our policy with federal law,” Liggett said. “We have a fiduciary responsibility as board members to protect this district to be the best of our knowledge and considering that the law seems, to me, clear on this, I need to protect the district from lawsuits that we would probably lose.”
Vice President Todd McKinney urged the board and public to look beyond this decision.
“When we refuse to see people’s humanity, then we have done something wrong as a society. Some people feel the majority is always right and if that were the case,” said McKinney, who is Black, “I would still be in chains. If that were the case, women wouldn’t have the right to vote. We need to figure out how we’re going to get along after this.”
