Columbus City Schools has changed the names and genders of transgender and gender-variant students this month to their name and sex assigned at birth in district systems after the district dropped its transgender policy to comply with state law.
According to the district and a letter sent to families, parents no longer have the ability to change their student’s name or gender in district systems, and existing changes have been reverted to the student’s original name and gender assigned at birth.
Dara Adkison, board secretary of advocacy group TransOhio, said that Columbus City Schools is the only district in the state to have made this decision. Adkison that the change will mean real harm for transgender and gender-variant CCS students.
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“To make that decision to uproot those students lives and take that sense of choice and agency away from them was cruel and harmful,” Adkison said.
In February, the CCS board rescinded its policy regarding transgender and gender-variant students in order to comply with a new state law after weighing whether to defy the law.
The new Ohio law, Senate Bill 104, requires K-12 and college students at public and private schools to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their sex assigned at birth. It also bans multi-occupancy, gender-neutral restrooms and prevents transgender students from sharing overnight accommodations with peers of different biological sex. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed the law in November and it took effect in January. The law does allow single-occupancy, gender-neutral restrooms.
When the CCS board voted to rescind the policy, transgender students and advocates in the room broke into applause after saying during public comment that rescinding the policy was the best way to support transgender students in light of the new law.
However, the rescinded policy also contained provisions pertaining to student gender identity, and the related administrative guidelines also contained information about how students and families could change the name and gender of a student in the district systems.
A letter sent to affected families, obtained by The Dispatch, said that families will no longer have the option to change a student’s gender or name. The letter also said that a student’s name and gender in Infinite Campus, the district’s student and parent portal, “will now match the information on the student’s birth certificate or other official record.”
“Parents may access Infinite Campus through the Parent Portal and list an alternative ‘nickname’ for their student if they so choose,” the letter to families said.
The now-former district policy stated that when staff or an administrator is required by law to provide a student’s legal birth name or sex assigned at birth, they should “adopt policies avoiding the inadvertent disclosure of such confidential information.” The former policy also said the portion of student records relating to transgender students’ preferred names and pronouns should be considered confidential and restricted.
In a statement, the district said that in order “to ensure legal compliance regarding official student records, Student Information System records had to be updated to match the information on student birth certificates or court orders.”
The district did not respond to inquiries about whether teachers would still be able to refer to students by their preferred name or gender identity.
Adkison said that there is “nothing proposed in the state house or at a federal level that would necessitate this kind of change.”
“And when we are in the climate we are in where there is such intense hatred being shouted from the rooftops by a very vocal few, we don’t need our allies, our schools, anyone to be trying to champion more discrimination,” Adkison said.
Adkison said that TransOhio has been contacting CCS and trying to understand the decision-making behind the change and is hoping that the district will revert the change.
“Just because harm was done doesn’t mean that the district has to stick with this choice, they have the conscious decision to change it back,” Adkison said. “And yes, harm is done no matter what, but they don’t have to stay with this change.”
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columbus Schools changes student profiles to birth name, gender
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