Plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit that says censorship laws and policies in Georgia schools are unconstitutional and negatively affect both teachers and gender-nonconforming students have been backed by the US Department of Justice, 16 states and the District of Columbia.
The federal agency, the states, DC and plaintiffs recently filed responses to defendant Cobb county school district’s motion to dismiss the case.
The two amicus or “friends of the court” briefs “speak to the impact this case is seen as having – not just in Cobb county, but across the country”, said Michael Tafelski, interim deputy legal director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, representing the plaintiffs.
“It is rare for the DoJ” to issue such a brief, Tafelski added. The agency declined to comment.
The case concerns Katherine Rinderle, an elementary school teacher of “gifted and talented” students whom the suburban school district fired last year after she read a book titled My Shadow Is Purple to a fifth-grade class – and the impact of her firing on other teachers and students who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. Plaintiffs include the teacher and an anonymous student.
The justice department’s brief asserts that “the United States has a significant interest in ensuring that teachers, who often possess unique and direct knowledge of discrimination experienced by students in their schools, can speak out about what they reasonably and in good faith believe to be a hostile educational environment based on sex, without fear of reprisal”.
The 16 states – including California, Michigan and New York – and Washington DC argue that Cobb county’s “ban of LGBTQ topics in classrooms lacks a legitimate pedagogical purpose, rendering it constitutionally suspect”. The states also assert that such policies cause harm to children and impede learning, which could then affect other jurisdictions if those same children and their families move out of Georgia.
The lawsuit alleges that the county’s actions violated Title IX, the federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded educational settings; the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment; and first amendment free speech rights.
Rinderle bought My Shadow Is Purple – a picture book “featuring a student who does not conform to gender stereotypes” – at a Scholastic book fair, according to plaintiffs’ response to the motion to dismiss. Scholastic recommends the book for five-to-eight-year-olds. The teacher of more than a decade chose the title “because of its anti-bullying message”, according to the amended complaint, reported on by the Guardian in July. Her class voted on books for a morning “read-aloud” session and nine of 15 students chose the 32-page book.
Two days after the reading session, one parent and then another emailed complaints to the school’s principal. The second called “anything in the genre of ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘queer’ … divisive”. The principal forwarded the emails to the school district’s central office. Within five days, on 13 March of last year, the county suspended Rinderle. By August, the school district fired the teacher of more than 10 years.
One of the two policies the district applied in its decision prohibits teaching “divisive” concepts. It was amended to include this language after the 2022 Protect Students First bill passed in Georgia; both the law and the policy refer to a series of concepts dealing with race as examples of prohibited content – but don’t mention gender.
The plaintiffs’ brief filed in response to defendants’ motion to dismiss alleges that “[d]efendants consider gender non-conforming and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (‘LGBTQ’) people, identities, and topics to be per se ‘controversial’ and ‘divisive,’ ignore gender non-conforming and LGBTQ students’ needs, and silence any discussion of them”.
In one of the two amicus briefs, the 16 states and DC describe their own policies with regard to “allow[ing] (or even requir[ing]) educators to address LGBTQ issues” while “ensuring parental input in education without targeting a vulnerable group of students”.
The brief refers to a 2022 Child Trends report that claims: “For students who are … LGBTQ+, research demonstrates that affirming policies … are associated with reduced rates of bullying and suicide, among other outcomes.”
The same report notes that 26 states had enacted 121 such policies at the time – including anti-bullying and “inclusive educational materials”. None of these were in Georgia and few were in the south.
The plaintiffs assert that “[r]esearch shows … a failure to provide LGBTQ-inclusive classroom instruction adversely affects LGBTQ students’ … learning outcomes and results in increased anti-LGBTQ bias”.
“These are not just the opinions of some lawyers,” said Tafelski. “This is documented by experts.”
The justice department’s focus on Title IX drilled into plaintiffs’ allegations that Cobb county created a “hostile environment” for students that included discrimination based on sex, highlighting Rinderle’s account of her unsuccessful attempts to get school administrators to address students “bullying” other students based on them being queer.
The federal agency also pointed to how “the District’s interpretation and enforcement of its ‘Divisive Concepts’ Policies heightened the sex-based hostile environment these students experienced … prohibit[ing] ‘any reference to gender nonconformity or LGBTQ topics in class’”.
This sort of prohibition results in unequal treatment, allege plaintiffs: the school district “convey[s] to one class of students that they are ‘normal’ and superior; and that the other class are outcasts and inferior”.
