This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
Despite repeated pressure from the federal Department of Education in 2025, Prince William County Public Schools has maintained its regulation that allows students to use school facilities such as locker rooms and bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity rather than biological sex.
And the school system has no plans to change its policy despite threats of federal funding being pulled, School Board Chair Dr. Babur Lateef told InsideNoVa Monday.
In July, the federal government claimed five Northern Virginia school divisions – Prince William, Arlington, Loudoun and Fairfax counties and the city of Alexandria – violated Title IX by maintaining policies and regulations that allow students to access intimate school facilities based on gender identity rather than sex.
The education department issued a resolution agreement to the school divisions that included a requirement the divisions rescind the relevant policies and regulations.
The department also placed the five school districts on “high risk” status because of the transgender regulations. That status means all federal funding for the districts is now done by reimbursement only, and the department further scrutinizes those reimbursement requests. The department has also threatened to freeze federal funding if the school divisions do not change their policies.
According to Lateef, no federal funding has been withheld to date.
“[The] Department of Education never cut a single dollar to us, and we still maintain our policies, as we have over the last five, six years,” Lateef told InsideNoVa Monday. “There’s been no change to any of our policies for inclusion, and we continue to do them, and they seem to be working fine … and, I guess if they do cut federal funding, then we’ll probably have to deal with that at the time, but it hasn’t happened yet.”
Following the announcement of the divisions’ high-risk status, Arlington and Fairfax counties sued the Department of Education seeking to have the status reversed.
Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. ultimately dismissed that case, saying the court did not have the power to weigh in on how the federal government distributes money, but he also gave credence to the argument made by the school divisions.
Despite dismissing the lawsuit, Aslton said Fairfax and Arlington counties’ policies comply with current legal precedent on the issue of transgender students in school facilities and are not in violation of Title IX. Prince William’s rules are similar to those of Arlington and Fairfax.
The precedent Alston referred to was Grimm v. Gloucester, a 2020 Fourth Circuit court case in which a transgender student, Gavin Grimm, sued the Gloucester County School Board in Virginia for not allowing him to use the boys restroom as a transgender boy. The findings of that case held that prohibiting students from using facilities that correspond with their gender identity constitutes sex discrimination under Title IX and violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
That legal precedent is what Prince William has leaned on as the basis for its regulation.
At the time of the ruling, Lateef told InsideNoVa he felt “reassured” by the ruling because of Alston’s message that the Grimm v. Gloucester ruling is “binding law.”
“He’s validated that for us, and so we believe that we are not breaking the law and, under that criteria, we don’t believe the federal government has any right to enforce any action against the school division,” Lateef said at the time.
