A Pennsylvania school district has reversed course and boarded up recently installed window openings that allowed people to see into two gender-neutral bathrooms in a high school hallway, its superintendent said Friday.
The two windows were installed in recent weeks following an August vote by the South Western School District’s conservative-majority school board, a move the board’s chairman said was intended to monitor and prevent misconduct. Such openings were not installed in any of the school’s non-gender neutral bathrooms.
The openings were covered with plywood Thursday at the advice of attorneys from the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center, a conservative legal group that the board consulted before ordering the windows to be installed, Superintendent Jay Burkhart said.
“I believe we need to protect all of our students,” Burkhart said in a telephone interview. “Students have a right to privacy and I do not want to violate that.”
The administration “has been targeting and disenfranchising transgender students for some time now,” said Kristina Moon, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Education Law Center, which has asked affected students to reach out. She said the “multiple levels and assignments” of bathrooms “overcomplicated a non-issue,” stigmatizing students.
“Now they’ve put real holes in the windows in the student bathrooms – but only the bathrooms they expect trans and non-binary kids to use. This is a horrific violation of children’s privacy and cruel discrimination against trans and non-binary children,” Moon said in an emailed statement.
The mother of an eighth-grader at Emory H. Markle Middle School in Hanover said Friday she considered the decision to cover the windows “a small victory.”
Jennifer Holahan, who drew attention to the bathroom window openings by posting a photo on social media, said she is “nervous to see” what happens next week at a conservative-majority school board meeting.
“This is an ongoing agenda that they have had,” Holahan said in a telephone interview. “They have proven this more than once. I think this is the first time the school board president has been eliminated. And I wonder what will come of that.”
School board Chairman Matthew A. Gelazela, elected as a Libertarian in 2021, told a reporter seeking comment on Friday that he considered the call to be criminal harassment and abruptly hung up.
Earlier this week, Gelazela issued a statement defending the bathroom windows as a safety improvement – that “by making the area outside the stalls more visible, we are better able to monitor a wide range of prohibited activities, such as possible vaping, drug use, bullying or absenteeism,” the Avondzon van Hannover reported.
Gelazela’s statement also warned students not to consider bathroom areas outside restroom stalls as private.
Markle Middle School Principal Wes Winters asked Gelazela questions about the bathroom windows. Board member Justin Lighty declined to discuss the case, while several other board members and the board’s attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In an emailed statement, the ACLU of Pennsylvania described the school board’s policy as discriminatory and one that makes children less safe. The South Western School District has approximately 4,400 students.
The York Dispatch reported this week, the board has been looking into LGBTQ+ students and restrooms for more than a year, establishing five bathroom categories based on concerns from unspecified people: male and female based on gender assigned at birth , men and women based on gender identity, and single-user facilities that are considered gender neutral.
Gelazela said during an Aug. 14 board meeting that the windows were part of bathroom changes intended to promote privacy, the Dispatch reported. The vote was 6-3 in favor of adding the windows, although the Evening Sun reported that work had already started when the vote took place.
Holahan said the window openings not only allowed people in the hallway to see into the bathrooms, but they also allowed sounds from the bathrooms to be heard. Burkhart, the superintendent, said the two gender-neutral bathrooms do not pose a specific problem for the type of misconduct Gelazela cited. The renovations cost $8,700, Burkhart said.
At least 11 states have passed laws banning transgender girls and women from using girls’ and women’s restrooms in public schools, and in some cases other government facilities.
As for Pennsylvania, the Education Law Center wrote in a January analysis that federal appeals courts have ruled that students have the right to use bathrooms and locker rooms that reflect their gender identity. Moon, a senior lawyer at the center, said all children have the right to use an easily accessible bathroom that is convenient for their classes and that provides them with real privacy and does not discriminate on the basis of sex and gender identity.