Hundreds of students at Monarch High School in Coconut Creek, Fort Lauderdale, chose to boycott classrooms at noon on Tuesday. Rather than let normal class activities commence, the kids trooped out in a file onto the school’s football field.
Pictures taken from the scene show students holding signs in favor of trans rights while others chanted, “Trans lives matter.”
The protest started a day after the high school’s principal, James Cecil, and four others’ reassignment to non-school sites. This occurs amid an ongoing investigation by Broward County officials.
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The investigation is to ascertain whether the school should let a transgender student compete on its girls’ volleyball team. If that happens, the school will be violating state law.
A Broward County Public Schools spokesperson has confirmed the status of Cecil and the other staffers. They were allegedly reassigned “pending the outcome of an investigation into allegations of improper student participation in sports.” However, there was no specification that it was because the student was transgender.
The district’s superintendent, Peter Licata, fielded a flurry of reporters’ questions at a Tuesday news conference. The questions were about the transgender student’s participation in the high school’s girls’ volleyball team.
According to Licata, there will now be “new processes” for athlete eligibility. He said:
“We’ll have an extra level of investigation on making sure everyone is eligible for the sport they’re playing, in all aspects, grade level, grades, and so forth.”
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the state law that bars transgenders from competing on women’s sports teams in public schools.
He is currently campaigning to be the 2024 Republican nominee for president. And will probably prefer that there be no exceptions to the law.
Over 20 other states in the USA have similar laws restricting trans athletes’ participation in school sports.
A lawsuit was filed in June 2021 against the governor, the School Board of Broward County, and several other Florida officials. The court documents argued that the measure violated Title IX. This landmark civil rights law bans sex-based discrimination at any school that receives funding from the federal government.
A plaintiff in the lawsuit — which a federal judge rejected earlier this month — is a teenage girl who wants to try out for her public school’s volleyball team in Broward County. Her true identity is unknown as only her initials, D.N., represent her.
Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union, suggests that the staffers reassigned might not have known they were breaking the law by allowing the trans girl to join the team.
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She said: “It’s getting harder and harder for our educators to really understand everything that’s happening. Our teachers don’t always understand new laws that come out, old laws that have been out.”
She added, “They just want to show up and be the teacher, the coach, the counselor to help a student thrive.”
The investigation will investigate the possibility that the principal or staffers were aware they were breaking the law, but that detail remains unverified as things stand.
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