Two schools join restroom lawsuit

HARROLD, Texas -- A battleground over whether public schools must allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice is taking shape in two tiny towns in Texas and Arizona, neither of which currently enrolls anyone who is transgender.

A lawsuit by nine states, the education department of another and the governor of an 11th state against President Barack Obama's administration claims that a new federal directive about transgender students thrusts "seismic changes" upon 100,000 schools nationwide.

But only two districts joined the lawsuit -- Harrold Independent School District, in a Texas farming town with 100 students and a 2016 graduating class of four, and the Heber-Overgaard Unified School District northeast of Phoenix, with about 450 students.

The Harrold district previously drew national attention when it encouraged teachers to carry handguns in the classroom.

The Obama administration's directive handed down this month said transgender students must be allowed to use restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

The lawsuit asks a judge to declare the directive unlawful, accusing the Obama administration of using powers reserved for Congress and conspiring "to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment."

With Texas, the states bringing the challenge are Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin. The Arizona Department of Education and Maine's Gov. Paul LePage also joined the suit.

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican, said in a statement Thursday that his office had already spoken with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton about getting involved. "I intend, as soon as possible, to join the lawsuit against this latest example of federal overreach," Bryant said in a statement.

But later Thursday, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood said he wouldn't represent Bryant if the state joined the suit. Hood, a Democrat, sided with Virginia officials in a federal lawsuit last year that sought to block the Justice Department from telling schools how to set bathroom policies. Hood was on the losing side of that suit, with an appeals court ruling that a high school discriminated against a transgender teen by banning him from using the boys' restroom.

Harrold is near the Texas-Oklahoma border and within the northern Texas federal court district where the lawsuit was filed. The next stop would be the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans -- one of the nation's most conservative benches.

Kindergartners through high school students in Harrold share 10 restrooms in a single brick school building that is shorter than the football field, where the Harrold Hornets play six-man football because there are not enough players for 11. A few times a day, a train rumbles past the school. Superintendent David Thweatt said "hobos" sometimes jump off and wander toward campus. Once, he said, a drifter holed up in a school bus and left a smell that took days to air out.

It's those sorts of strangers, Thweatt said, who could take advantage of bathroom rights for students who are transgender.

"I don't agree with the term [transgender]. Tell me, exactly, where that person fits into?" said Thweatt, 55, who is one of two dozen employees in the district. "If you're just saying 'I feel like something else,' then that opens the door very widely. It's a slippery slope. What happens when someone says 'I'm a 35-year-old, but I feel like a 15-year old?' We're going to say what you really are."

Thweatt said Paxton's office called him May 17, only four days after U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the directive and said there was "no room in our schools for discrimination."

Thweatt said he thinks he got the call because someone in Paxton's office knew of him.

Asked why Harrold was chosen to join the lawsuit, Paxton spokesman Marc Rylander would say only that the Texas attorney general's office "engages with many concerned parents and school officials." The White House has declined to comment.

Harrold has previously enrolled openly gay students, Thweatt said, adding that they were not bullied.

He said a transgender student would be welcome in the hallways, even though the school board passed a policy this week requiring students to choose the bathroom based on their birth certificate. He said the timing was unrelated to the lawsuit filed just two days later.

"We're not mean. We're not awful. As a matter of fact, we can be friendlier and more accommodating than any other place, small schools," Thweatt said. "But our school is not just kids."

In Arizona, the Heber-Overgaard Unified School District has about 450 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. School officials defended their involvement as a matter of local control and not an issue of transgender rights.

Opponents of the directive say school districts could lose federal education dollars if they don't comply, although federal officials have not explicitly made that threat.

Ron Tenney, superintendent of the Arizona district, called the risk of losing government money "kind of disturbing."

Information for this article was contributed by Jamie Stengle of The Associated Press and by Mark Berman of The Washington Post.

A Section on 05/27/2016