Duane Morris found Central Bucks didn’t discriminate against LGBTQ students. Here’s what happens next.

After a five-month investigation, the Duane Morris law firm said it’s found no evidence the Central Bucks School District has created a hostile environment for LGBTQ students, as the American Civil Liberties Union has alleged to federal officials.

In a 146-page report presented to the school board Thursday, the firm — which the district hired following the ACLU complaint — accused Democrats and activists of “weaponizing” allegations to undermine Republicans who had won a majority on the board in November 2021.

The report was immediately dismissed as a “political defense” by the ACLU, which said it expects the U.S. Department of Education will find that the district is “systematically and intentionally violating students’ civil rights.”

Here’s what the report says, and what happens now:

The ACLU filed a complaint with the federal education department’s Office for Civil Rights in October, alleging a “chronic” failure to address “persistent and severe bullying of LGBTQ+ students.”

The complaint, filed on behalf of seven transgender or nonbinary students whose names and personal stories were redacted, came as the district was facing controversy over policies the ACLU and other critics alleged were targeting LGBTQ students, including a prohibition on “sexualized content” in library books and a proposed policy that would ban Pride flags from classrooms.

But Duane Morris lawyers, who conducted 45 interviews and reviewed 123,000 pages of documents and electronic records, did not find any failure to address bullying, said lawyer Michael Rinaldi.

In a presentation Thursday to the school board, which also released the full report online, Rinaldi said the “evidence shows this district puts a high priority on protecting students.” He shared emails from principals, indicating responses to reported incidents involving LGBTQ students.

And in interviews, he said, “witness after witness failed to come up with any specific instances” of unaddressed bullying of LGBTQ students.

Instead, Rinaldi laid blame on a Central Bucks teacher, whom he accused of seeking to bring discrimination allegations to light to drive opposition to the Republican board majority’s policies.

The teacher in question, Andrew Burgess, is suing the district, alleging it retaliated against him for helping a transgender student file a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights in April 2022.

His subsequent suspension from Lenape Middle School in May sparked protests, with accusations that the district had punished Burgess because of an effort to help the student.

But Burgess had “an ulterior motive,” Rinaldi told the school board. If the teacher brought to light bullying of LGBTQ students, “the school board would cave to the inevitable criticism and bad press — particularly if Mr. Burgess, aided by the press, could convince the public the district’s new policies were the cause” of the bullying and harassment.

He accused Burgess of manipulating the student, creating a “dossier” of incidents that included assaults and threats that he dissuaded the student and his family from revealing to administrators.

Burgess “convinced” the student that “guidance counselors would not help,” Rinaldi said. He said Burgess was well aware of the district’s system for reporting student disciplinary issues, but chose not to use it — unlike in instances of far less serious issues, such as reporting a student for not putting away a laptop promptly.

Burgess said in his lawsuit that the student’s family had previously contacted administrators, but the bullying continued. He said the student did not want to report the bullying to administrators, because he feared notification of the bullies’ parents and possible retaliation. Rinaldi did not mention those assertions.

Instead, Rinaldi framed the debate as not about discrimination, but a partisan dispute. He displayed an email that Karen Smith, a Democratic school board member, sent to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon in July 2022, saying a majority of board members had decided that Pride flags would no longer be allowed in classrooms.

Smith’s email also noted that the Education Law Center had accused the district of creating a hostile environment for LGBTQ youth and voiced concerns about other district actions, including requiring parental permission before students could use a different name or pronouns, and changes to the delivery of sex education after a nonbinary student requested to participate in a girls’ class.

Smith contacted the office because the board’s Republican majority “took an action she didn’t like.” Rinaldi said.

“In a democracy, these are matters for the people’s elected representatives (or, in some cases, a matter of parents’ rights). But, having lost the November 2021 School Board election, the new minority attempted to weaponize federal investigatory resources to achieve their aims,” Duane Morris’ report reads.

Smith said Friday that she “was acting to protect students,” adding that the district was already facing scrutiny from the ACLU and Education Law Center at the time of her email.

Rinaldi said the district’s policies were reasonable. Of its policy prohibiting staff from advocating to students on political, partisan, or “social policy” issues, Rinaldi said, “The line had to be drawn somewhere.”

Critics have accused the district of targeting Pride flags, which are banned from classroom display under the policy, and which Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh in May 2022 likened to political symbols.

A previous version of the policy had specified that teachers could not advocate beliefs about gender identity or sexual orientation — language that was removed after a review by Duane Morris.

Rinaldi said the district’s policy targeting “sexualized content” in library books — reviewed by a law firm focused on religious freedom — was also neutral, and noted that to date, no books had been removed. (Central Bucks has received more than 60 challenges to library books, but has not commented on the status of those reviews; Lucabaugh recently disclosed that among other books being evaluated at the request of administrators, Lawn Boy, by Jonathan Evison, was reviewed but not removed from libraries.)

Rinaldi also said requiring parental consent for name and pronoun changes reflected “sound educational judgment.”

“It’s just not the case” that the district’s policies create a hostile environment for LGBTQ students, Rinaldi said.

Critics fired back even before the report’s release.

Marlene Pray, a Central Bucks parent and the director and founder of the Rainbow Room in Doylestown, a Planned Parenthood-sponsored LGBTQ youth center, told the board during public comment that she had been interviewed by Rinaldi.

He “made it clear that he believes there are two equally valid positions when it comes to queer students: those who believe in them and support them, and those who don’t,” Pray said. She called the investigation a “million-dollar PR stunt,” referring to district estimates of what Duane Morris will charge.

(Rinaldi said Thursday that the district has received 156 requests for documents from the Office for Civil Rights, and “that’s one of the reasons why we had to spend the money that we did.”)

Mindy Freeman, whose daughter, Lily, is a transgender student in Central Bucks and also spoke, said that “whatever the findings of this report today by the attorneys, our family knows the truth, because we are the truth.”

The district’s selection of Duane Morris and former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain to lead the investigation had been criticized as partisan. In seeking the Republican nomination for governor, McSwain — who was in the audience Thursday but did not speak — had called a West Chester school’s Gender Sexuality Alliance club “leftist political indoctrination.”

“A credible investigation would not have hired people who have an obvious bias against the trans and nonbinary students who lodged the complaint,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said in a statement Thursday night.

Walczak said that in the one interview he witnessed, “the district’s lawyer candidly admitted his team was not examining the impact of the board’s recent anti-LGBTQ+ actions because they are, in his words, lawful and reasonable.” He called the firm’s conclusions “worthless.”

Duane Morris recommended that the district suspend Burgess — now a teacher at Unami Middle School — without pay. It also said the district should “appropriately coordinate” to ensure that one bullied student’s needs were met.

Other than that, the message was: Keep doing what you’re doing.

“You have one of the best school districts in the state,” Rinaldi told the board, drawing applause from some in the audience.

The ACLU has asked the Office for Civil Rights to order Central Bucks to follow federal recommendations for supporting transgender students in schools; to require training for staff, administrators, and school board members on supporting LGBTQ youth; and to rescind discriminatory directives.

An OCR spokesperson said this week that the agency could not comment on pending investigations.

Democratic school board member Tabitha Dell’Angelo expressed concern that the report had minimized the voices of marginalized students.

“Are you telling us the students who come to us and tell us they don’t feel safe in schools are wrong?” she asked.

“Specifics matter,” as opposed to “generalized complaints about discrimination that might be happening to other people,” Rinaldi said. “The most important data point is what’s actually happening with you.”