For now City Schools Decatur is standing pat on its current policy of bathroom and locker use for transgender students.
“We’ve had transgender students for years,” Superintendent David Dude said this week. “So far we’ve been able to handle requests, usually made by parents of those students. Mostly they use a faculty restroom or referee’s restroom (in the gymnasium).”
In April, the U.S. Justice and Education departments told schools they must allow transgender students access to school restrooms “consistent with their gender identity.” But the Georgia High School Association, the state’s governing body for athletics, contradicts this by saying student treatment is based on their birth certificate’s stated gender. Dude also believes there’s a crucial flaw in the federal directive regarding showers and where they are taken, because it focuses only on homosexual, bisexual and transgender students, and not on the rest of the student population
Further complicating matters is that in May, Georgia joined a number of other states in filing a lawsuit against the April federal directive. Therefore Dude decided it was too soon to address any potential change in policy.
“If the time comes,” he said, “when we can’t accommodate someone, then we will have to make changes.”
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