Texas Border Business
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) referred its Title IX investigation into the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for further enforcement action. Simultaneously, ED will initiate an administrative proceeding to adjudicate termination of MDOE’s federal K-12 education funding, including formula and discretionary grants.
These actions are a direct result of MDOE’s continued refusal to comply with Title IX. ED issued a noncompliance finding on March 19, and sent a final warning letter to the state on March 31.
“The Department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor. “The Maine Department of Education will now have to defend its discriminatory practices before a Department administrative law judge and in a federal court against the Justice Department. Governor Mills would have done well to adhere to the wisdom embedded in the old idiom—be careful what you wish for. Now she will see the Trump Administration in court.”
Background:
Following a directed investigation of MDOE, ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found that MDOE has practices and policies that violate Title IX, including allowing males to compete in female sports and occupy women-only intimate spaces. MDOE refused to comply with OCR’s proposed Resolution Agreement to resolve its Title IX violations voluntarily.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. President Trump’s Executive Order Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports articulates United States policy, consistent with Title IX, to protect female student athletes from having “to compete with or against or to appear unclothed before males.”
