A Virginia school district is suing the U.S. Department of Education, saying the federal agency has put it in an “impossible position” by imposing funding restrictions due to the district’s policy that allows transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity. The district’s school board argues the policy complies with both state and federal law.
In the lawsuit filed Friday, the Fairfax County school board asks a federal court in Virginia to find the department’s actions “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and otherwise contrary to law.” It also asks a judge to agree that the district’s transgender student policies don’t violate Title IX.
It’s another lawsuit challenging the Education Department as it has aggressively deployed its office for civil rights to carry out President Donald Trump’s political agenda and enforce his executive orders that seek to roll back protections for transgender students.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has drawn more than 50 lawsuits challenging the president’s education policies, according to an Education Week tracker.
The Fairfax County school district’s lawsuit challenges the Education Department’s decision to require it and four other northern Virginia school districts to request reimbursement before they receive their federal school funds after the department found them each in violation of Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in schools.
The department alleged the districts violated the law by allowing transgender students to access “intimate facilities”—such as restrooms and locker rooms—that align with their gender identity. It gave the districts until Aug. 15 to sign a proposed resolution agreement, which directed them to rescind their policies and adopt the federal government’s definitions of “male” and “female.”
The funding restrictions it imposed when they didn’t sign the agreement place an added fiscal burden on the districts, which will have to front costs and wait for reimbursement from the federal Education Department—which the agency could ultimately deny, risking millions of dollars.
In its lawsuit, Fairfax County argues the 180,000-student district is simply following state and federal law, citing a federal appeals court decision that covers Virginia. After a yearslong legal battle, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2020 agreed with a transgender student that a school district’s policy barring him from using the boys’ restrooms violatied Title IX.
The appeals court reaffirmed that decision just weeks after the Education Department found the Virginia districts in violation of Title IX. The appeals court sided with a transgender boy in South Carolina who challenged a provision in the state budget threatening to cut off state funding to any district that allows transgender students to use bathroom and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity. (South Carolina has now asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in.)
The Education Department “has no legal basis, as it relies upon an incorrect interpretation of Title IX that is flatly inconsistent with binding precedent in the Fourth Circuit,” the Fairfax County district, which is one of the nation’s largest, argues in its lawsuit.
Roughly $167 million of the district’s more than $4 billion budget comes from federal dollars, with the largest portion supporting food and nutrition services. Other funds support services for students from low-income families, students with disabilities, students experiencing homelessness, and English learners, according to the lawsuit.
Because the Education Department has “conditioned FCPS’s receipt of federal funds on requirements FCPS cannot lawfully satisfy, FCPS has in fact lost access to those funds,” the lawsuit argues.
The district had reached out to the federal agency “to address the impossible position that the [Education Department] has placed on our school division—whether to violate a federal court ruling regarding the support of our transgender students or risk this critical funding,” Superintendent Michelle C. Reid wrote in a message to parents.
The department did not respond, she said, prompting the school board sue.
“This lawsuit is an important step in our effort to protect the health and safety of all our students in alignment with state and federal law—to ensure that hungry children are fed and that student access to multilingual, special education, and other essential services is not compromised,” she wrote in her letter. “We will not abide attempts to pit one group of students against another.”
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
