North Penn School District.
Residents prod board to respond to new White House policies
Sweeping changes at the federal level in the first week of the second Trump Administration could reach the local level soon.
North Penn’s school district officials announced Thursday that they’re resuming talks as soon as this week of two controversial district policies adopted last year.
“The vacating of Title IX, the adoption that happened in 2024: you guys were very anxious to change your policy to include that, even knowing that it was going to be reverted back. The question is, what are you going to do to remedy the situation?” said resident Jason Lanier.
“The DEI, the non-meritorious way of hiring people, all of this is being pushed aside. This isn’t happening. You can no longer do this. So how are you going to change what you have implemented over the last four or five years, that was in conflict with this policy?” he said.
In September 2024 board members adopted two updates to district policies 103 and 104 which spell out discrimination or harassment affecting students and discrimination or harassment affecting staff respectively. The policies both include language that prohibits discrimination based on sex, which is listed as including pregnancy, sex assigned at birth, “gender, including a person’s gender identity or gender expression,” their “affectional or sexual orientation,” and “differences of variations of sex characteristics or other intersex characteristics,” with a separate section listing definitions related to Title IX, the 1972 federal law against sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money.
In early 2024, the Biden Administration issued an update to Title IX that the administration argued was meant to increase protections for transgender students, and which opponents have argued could allow transgender females to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams and could allow boys and men into women and girls’ restrooms and locker rooms.
When North Penn discussed and passed their own update, district officials said the latest code update was meant to bring the district into compliance with the latest federal revisions, and were based on drafts set forth by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. At that time, the district’s solicitor said challenges had been filed from several states over whether the federal Department of Education has the authority to issue certain aspects and requirements of the regulations, and due to a case in Kansas, a federal judge issued an injunction prohibiting the federal department of education from enforcing the 2024 regulations at “any school in which members of the Moms for Liberty organization have their children in attendance,” naming North Penn High School, Pennfield Middle School, and A.M. Kulp Elementary specifically as schools where earlier regulations from 2020 would remain in place.
During the first board meeting of the second Trump Administration, Lanier asked the all-Democrat board when and how they would reverse that update after a barrage of executive orders from the White House this week, including one aimed at repealing those codes.
“How much money have you spent implementing these sorts of things? How much money do you have that uses discrimination in your policy, and limits the hiring process? Right now, there’s at least four policies that you have to change,” he said.
Lanier then told the board that he knew of “over 500 books” in school libraries “that deal with transgenderism, and that’s just separate titles, that’s not the multiple copies that are in most of the elementary schools, roughly half in the upper grades, roughly half in the primary grades,” Lanier said.
“Those all need to be removed. Your job is not to teach about people’s inner sexuality. That’s not part of your charge. Your charge is to educate them, so they meet higher standards, so they can succeed in life, not to have them navel-gaze about every possible issue they’re having,” he said. “Focus on education, get rid of the stuff that’s not supposed to be there, and do it quickly.”
Resident Bill Patchell made similar comments, asking how the board would address or handle the “men’s bathroom, women’s bathroom, forget it, we’re going back to the old policies,” and said he thought district residents were “hostages (to) high taxes” increased annually by the board, before questioning whether they were following a new federal push for artificial intelligence.
“Wait a minute, you’re investing in AI? About $500 billion? What’s going to happen to all the teachers? You’ll come back here in 15 years and where’s all the teachers?’ ‘Well, we’ve got a robot here, and the teachers are the assistants,'” he said.
District solicitor Kyle Somers addressed the Title IX question minutes later, during his monthly report to the board, after announcing that the board had met for an executive session “regarding legal developments related to Title IX.”
“Earlier this month, there was a federal district court decision in Kentucky that vacated the 2024 regulations, that had been issued under Title IX. And so the impact of that is largely a reversion to the regulations that were in place before that, the 2002 regulations,” he said.
He then summarized the board adoption last fall of the updated policies 103A and 104A, and noted that the board also kept in place the 2020 regulations due to the injunctions regarding those schools, before saying that further talks will happen soon.
“At the upcoming policy (committee) meeting, on Monday, Jan. 27 at 5 p.m., the recommendation is that that committee take up policies 103A and 104A and hear recommendations on what to do with them: whether they should be amended, whether to suspend them, or repeal them, what to do with our existing 103 and 104, and so there’ll be an opportunity to further discuss the impact of these developments at that time,” Somers said.
Board member Al Roesch added that the district will always follow the law, and board member Christian Fusco sought to assure families.
“It sounds as though the district is no longer going to enact policies and procedures to protect these students. That is absolutely not the case. This is a reporting requirement, that the federal government made law, and is now rescinding as a law,” he said.
“It really isn’t going to change much at all about the practices the district engages in, in these types of situations. So any families hearing this, please know that this is a technical issue more than it is a logistics issue. We are still very much interested in protecting every student — every student, Mr. Lanier — that’s in our buildings,” Fusco said.
Superintendent Todd Bauer added an assurance for students.
“It will not change our practice. So the experience of our students should not change as a result of these changes. Some of the behind-the-scenes paperwork, and the ways in which we process things related to Title IX, perhaps, but not our student experience,” he said.
