Florida Board of Education Adopts Sweeping Anti-LGBTQ Rules
Florida Board of Education Adopts Sweeping Anti-LGBTQ Rules
ORLANDO, FL -- Today, the Florida Board of Education voted to adopt five new rules targeting the LGBTQ community and expanding the Governor’s war on academic freedom. The rules, which introduce punishment for transgender students and staff who access restrooms that align with their gender identity, expand anti-LGBTQ censorship efforts to extracurricular activities, impose new barriers to students having their names and pronouns respected in school, and limits the ability to teach accurate and honest Black history and LGBTQ-inclusive history. These are alarming efforts by the DeSantis regime to weaponize state agencies and legislative processes against the LGBTQ community in service to his political ambitions.
“This politically-motivated war on parents, students, and educators needs to stop,” said Jennifer Solomon, Equality Florida Parents & Families Support Manager. “Our students deserve classrooms where all families are treated with the respect they deserve and all young people are welcomed. Instead, the DeSantis Administration continues to wield the state against us, insisting that politicians know better than we do how best to educate our children. Let parents be parents. Let educators be educators. And stop turning our kids’ classrooms into political battlefields to score cheap points.”
Among the rules adopted today are Rule No. 6A-10.086, which threatens students with discipline for using a restroom other than one that reflects their sex assigned at birth, and Rule No. 6A-10.081, which threatens an educator’s credentials for using a restroom other than one that reflects their sex assigned at birth. These rules are a stunning invasion of the privacy of students and faculty, and will exacerbate the worsening mental health of LGBTQ students and accelerate the exodus of qualified teachers from the profession. Ongoing policy debates over the right of transgender people to live free of discrimination have had a detrimental effect on the mental health of LGBTQ youth and many transgender students admit to avoiding using the restroom for an entire school day where these policies have been implemented, leading to physical health consequences as well.
The Board approved the new series of rules despite an overwhelming show of opposition from members of the public. Nearly 200 people attended the meeting, representing families, students, parents, and educators from across the state, to speak out against the continued onslaught against schools in their communities. The move also comes in the wake of a similar rulemaking process undergone earlier this year that expanded the state’s Don’t Say LGBTQ law’s provisions to all K-12 classrooms and extended liability for violations of the law to individual educators.