Over the past few days there has been a flurry of discussion involving the Coeur d'Alene School District. A student has come out against Coeur d'Alene High School and the school district for doing nothing when she complained to the office about males using the girls bathroom. The office, as well as the superintendent, said that even though the male dresses and acts like a boy he "identifies" as a female so there is nothing they can do about the situation. They told the female student that if she has a problem with it then she can find another bathroom to use.
Two reasons were given for the school's inaction, at different times:
It is a federal Title IX issue and they can't do anything about it, and
There is no policy set by the board so their hands are tied and they can't do anything about it.
If you remember, Kootenai County Spectator posted an article a few weeks ago about the bombshell discovery that the Coeur d'Alene School District does not have an official public policy regarding sexual orientation/gender identities, but it does have non-public guidelines that were put in place in 2014.
Because the district only has these guidelines in place, they say they cannot do anything about the males using the female restrooms "as long as they identify as female" and it doesn't matter how uncomfortable the females are in the restroom. What is really interesting about the district's inaction is that in the 2014 guidelines discusses that if a transgender person is uncomfortable using the bathroom of their biology then they can go to the office to make different arrangements. Nowhere in the guidelines does it say that a student of gender identity can use the opposite gender's bathrooms and damned the female who is uncomfortable for having biological males using her bathroom.
The superintendent can make excuses all day about why he is not protecting the females of the school district, and parents have every right to be angry at him for not protecting the girls, but I'm going to throw him a bone and show him a model policy from one of our neighboring districts.
Lakeland Joint School District, headquartered in Rathdrum, has recently been asking parents and community members to give feedback on a draft Policy 3281. If you remember, the dreaded Policy 3281 is the sexual orientation policy that caused a hoopla in the Caldwell (ID) School District and parents were so outraged over the lack of protection for their daughters that the Caldwell School Board shut down the meeting.
The number, Policy 3281, is the standard number for all sexual orientation policies modeled after the Idaho School Board Association (ISBA) Model Policies. So each school board can use the ISBA model policy as a foundation and then modify it to suit the district's specific needs. Lakeland took the ISBA Model Policy 3281 and completely changed it to a common sense approach to the topic of sexual orientation.
Click on the images below to see the draft Lakeland version of Policy 3281. Download the pdf version here.
Here are some of the parts that Kootenai County Spectator believes can help the CDA School Board create their own Policy 3281:
Yes, almost the entire draft policy was called out above. Coeur d'Alene School Board should just take the entire Lakeland policy and use it as their own because Lakeland knows what their school district should be focusing on instead.
This draft policy has been sent to the CDA School trustees ahead of their Monday board meeting so let's hope they take this draft and run.
Thank you Lakeland School Board and Superintendent Arnold for your leadership throughout the county; as a Lake City High School alumni I apologize for the snobbish attitude I've always had towards your school district and look forward to seeing what you do in the future.