School boards across Virginia are facing an important decision now that the Virginia Department of Education has issued a new model policy on transgender students.
Back in 2021, then-Governor Ralph Northam’s Department of Education issued a model policy for school divisions to respect the names and pronouns that transgender students wanted. At that time, the Family Foundation urged school boards to reject the model policy.
Now, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin's Education Department has a model policy that moves in the other direction, giving parents the right to decide which names and pronouns are used rather than students.
Todd Gathje at the Family Foundation says school boards should adopt the new model policy.
"We encouraged school boards not to adopt the 2021 version," Gathje says. "Now that the policies have properly been revised and restore important constitutional rights, we would encourage and urge these local school boards to adopt these policies."
Former Education Secretary Atif Qarni says the model policy is really more of a suggestion than a requirement laid out in the Virginia code. He says school board members can make their own decisions about how they want to handle transgender students.
"They don't have to adopt these policies at all or as is," Qarni says. "They can do some components of them or they can keep the 2021 components if they adopted them in the past. They can flat out ignore them as well."
Now, school board members across Virginia are facing a choice: adopt the new model policies or ignore them and move on.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
