Recent Title IX rulings bar public schools from discriminating against transgender students, a mandate that has been widely interpreted as requiring them to be assigned locker rooms based on the gender with which they most identify. Reporter David Haldane takes a look at how that’s being implemented in the Morongo Basin…
It was never a burning question in the old days; boys showered with boys and girls with girls.
Enter the 21st century. Today school locker room assignments are based, not on the gender of one’s birth but of one’s choice.
That means change, and the Morongo Unified School District is smack in the middle of it. That’s because it’s spending $1.5 million to remodel aging locker rooms with the new rules in mind.
Don’t misunderstand; there are still separate facilities for boys and girls. But the new ones will have special areas set aside affording more privacy to those who need it. And instead of communal lockers, they will be smaller and more individualized.
It’s all part of the effort, Superintendent Tom Baumgarten says, to make students feel at home. “I think that regardless of their gender orientation, their race or their ethnicity, as one transgender student told me, ‘I was a human before and I’m going to be a human after. Just help educate me and you’ll do your job.’ ”
LOCAL SCHOOL LOCKER ROOMS BEING CONVERTED TO TRANSGENDER
