Perkiomen Valley rejects policy to restrict transgender students’ bathroom use

There are no current plans to move forward with a policy banning transgender students in the Perkiomen Valley School District from using bathrooms aligned with their gender identities, after the school board narrowly voted down the proposal earlier this week.

While some board members indicated during a meeting Monday that the proposal would be taken up by the board’s policy committee after it failed to gain approval that night, Jason Saylor, the board’s president, said Wednesday that “no board members have made any requests to add it” to the committee’s agenda.

The board split 5-4 against the policy, which had been proposed a week earlier following a father’s post on social media that his daughter was distressed after she entered a bathroom at the high school and believed a male was there.

The father told the board he wasn’t sure whether the person in question was transgender, but was upset by the response he received from the district, indicating that it allowed students to use the bathrooms that matched their gender identity, and that his daughter could use a single-user restroom if she was uncomfortable.

While LGBTQ students and families and other critics called the debate discriminatory — stigmatizing transgender students for using the same bathrooms as their peers — the board voted 5-4 to fast-track a policy that would have restricted bathroom use to students of the same sex.

On Monday, however, the move to adopt the policy — which mirrored one passed earlier this year in the Pennridge School District — failed. Don Fountain, a board member who had previously voted in favor of advancing the policy, joined the dissenting four members in voting no on Monday. He didn’t give a reason for his decision.

Saylor, who had favored the policy, said the question was broader than bathrooms. “Should we be social engineering and indoctrinating our students to think there is a gender spectrum?” he said during the board meeting.

The district’s superintendent, Barbara Russell, said the bathroom debate stirred on social media hadn’t been present in schools. “There are very few students that even choose to do this,” Russell said. “It has not been an issue for our schools or our principals in their leadership.”

Meanwhile, critics and other board members said that passing the policy would target already vulnerable students.

“What you’re proposing... is removing people’s dignity,” said board member Tammy Campli, warning that the board would be sued if it passed the policy. Before voting, the board held an executive session for about half an hour to get advice from its solicitor.

Russell told the board Monday that the policy would be difficult to enforce.

“There are students who present to us, and clearly present as males, but may have been born as females,” Russell said.

In a high school of 1,700 students, she said, “how do we monitor that? Do we pull a birth certificate every time a student we’re wondering about wants to use the bathroom? And that isn’t even monitored.”