My View
What Our Children Need to See by Vicki Wilson
When her children’s school district secretly opened its schools’ restrooms to the opposite sex and then opened the girls’ locker room to a boy, Vicki Wilson took action. She organized a coalition of 51 families in the Palatine, Illinois area to advocate for the right to privacy and safety of all students.
W
e all have to have a hobby, and mine is attending school board meetings. There’s a group of us in the Palatine, Illinois area who have been involved with local education for some time, so when the news broke that the U.S. Department of Education was threatening our school district with removing federal funding if administrators didn’t allow a boy into the girls’ locker rooms, we were all shocked. A student at our high school—Student A— is anatomically male, but identifies as female. Represented by his parents, he filed a complaint against the school district with the U.S. Department of Education for “discrimination on the basis of sex” because the school district would not allow him to access the girls’ locker room. To accommodate the student, the school even went so far as to install a bank of lockers in a private bathroom and offered that friends of the student who were also comfortable changing there could be assigned lockers in that area so that the student wouldn’t have to change alone. This didn’t satisfy the student, or the Department of Education which subsequently threatened to strip federal funding for the school district. As settlement discussions continued, parents with daughters at the school began calling to tell us that the school had put up privacy curtains in the locker room. Moms kept explaining to me that some people think, “Oh, well if there are privacy curtains, then it’s no big deal.” What those people don’t understand is that the boy who identifies as
17
transgender is still walking past the other girls —while they’re getting undressed—on his way to and from the curtain. And a lot of these girls knew him as a boy during junior high or elementary school. The girls in our high school were very stressed and very uncomfortable. Studies show that up to 25% of girls will have been sexually abused by the time they’re 18, so our high school, like every high school, has girls who’ve experienced abuse. For all girls, the presence of a boy is a privacy violation. But for girls who have been abused, it can cause more significant psychological and emotional trauma. ADF sent administrators a letter explaining that the school didn’t need to give in on this, and federal law was on their side. Unfortunately, the school district chose to ignore that input.
So, a group of us parents launched the D211 Parents for Privacy group, meeting in one of the parent’s houses. We scrambled to respond— launching a website, handing out flyers, starting a Facebook page, getting on the radio … the goal was to motivate parents and community members to attend the next school board meeting, where this issue would be discussed. Over 400 parents attended that meeting. The board allowed two hours for public comments, and about 90 percent were in favor of privacy. Some of the girls bravely spoke out at the board meeting and shared how this policy affects them.