Anne Arundel Schools Rewrite Gender Identity Rules Under Federal Pressure

On August 19, Anne Arundel County Public Schools in Maryland rewrote the regulation that governs how staff handle a student’s gender identity. The amended language is blunt: “No policy, guideline, or practice may limit or otherwise interfere with parental rights under FERPA.” Parents, the district now says, may inspect their child’s complete education record — including gender identity, transgender status, sexual orientation, preferred name and pronouns.

The change came three weeks after the U.S. Department of Education and the Justice Department announced a joint enforcement action against the district. Fights over what a school tells a parent are not new, and they rarely stay local; the longer arc runs through our transgender history archive.

What happened

On July 27, the Education Department’s Student Privacy Policy Office and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced action against Anne Arundel County and put Ann Arbor Public Schools in Michigan on notice. According to the Education Department’s July 27 announcement, Anne Arundel had classified students’ gender identity information as confidential medical data that parents could not see. The department also alleged that school staff helped one student present as male without the parents’ knowledge, that a principal declined to discuss the matter, and that an assistant principal refused to hand over records.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the practice “not only an affront to basic moral principles, but also to parents’ rights under federal law.” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said “FERPA is not optional, and any districts that attempt to bypass or distort its requirements should expect immediate federal action.” Ann Arbor was given until August 10 to explain why enforcement should not proceed. The consequences on the table are the ones that get a superintendent’s attention: loss of federal funding, and litigation.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act gives parents the right to inspect their minor child’s education records and to have a say in how personally identifiable information is disclosed. Its enforcement mechanism is money. In a separate July 30 notice, the department also asked California and Washington’s state education agencies to detail how they intend to revise their own policies.

Superintendent Mark T. Bedell issued the amendments on August 19, writing that no district policy may interfere with parental rights under FERPA. The district has said it takes those responsibilities seriously and will respond through the appropriate process once it receives formal documentation. Two families have separately sued the district over related claims, CBS News Baltimore reported; that case is pending, and nothing in the rewrite resolves it.

Two readings of the same law

To the administration and to many parents, this is not a close call. A minor’s school records belong, legally, to the parents; a district that builds a category of information parents cannot see has invented an exception Congress never wrote. Trust between home and school, on this view, is the thing being protected.

Districts that adopted confidentiality guidance were answering a different worry: that a small number of students are not safe at home, and that a school which discloses on a fixed schedule cannot account for that. Advocates point to survey research from GLSEN and The Trevor Project reporting that a majority of transgender, nonbinary and gender-expansive students attend schools with policies they experience as hostile, that close to a third recently missed school over safety concerns, and that students with supportive educators report a stronger sense of belonging. Whether a student’s stated name or pronoun is even an “education record” under FERPA, rather than a daily classroom practice, remains contested — and courts have not settled it.

It is worth noticing what this episode has in common with others. Federal leverage — funding, subpoenas, investigations — is doing work that legislatures and courts once did more slowly, a pattern also visible in the Ninth Circuit’s recent subpoena ruling. And as usual, the people most affected are the least quoted, something I keep circling back to in where is the transgender voice. Sometimes the policy really is a solution in search of a problem; sometimes it isn’t. The wider run of these decisions is collected in the Politics & Public Policy reading guide. Both can be true across a district this size.

What I keep thinking about is the ordinary kid in the middle of this — not a test case, not a press release, just someone who has to walk into a building on Monday. A rule was rewritten above her head in a single memo. Whatever else the lawyers settle, someone should ask her how the week went.