By Stephen Appezzato
MIDDLETOWN – Following the adoption of transgender student policy revisions last week by three county school boards, state Attorney General Matthew Platkin quickly filed lawsuits to halt the changes. Area Republican legislators were seemingly just as quick to fire back.
Amid fervent debate, Middletown Township, Marlboro Township and Manalapan-Englishtown Regional school boards each voted to adopt revisions to their transgender student policies June 20. According to Platkin, these “discriminatory policies” violate state law and “will harm our kids and pose severe risk to their safety” if allowed to take effect.
The approved revisions require schools to notify parents or guardians if a student requests to be addressed by a different gender, name or identity.
Residents and groups attended the school board meetings to express both disdain and support for the tabled policies. In Middletown, chants of “Let us in” rang across the school grounds when many members of the public were denied entry to the building due to room capacity restrictions. The Middletown Township Board of Education meeting was held in the Middletown High School North library.
Less than two days later, the state Attorney General’s office filed civil rights complaints against the three school boards. Emergency requests for preliminary injunctions and temporary restraints were also filed to “preserve the status quo during the litigation” and ensure that school officials are not forced to “out” transgender, gender nonconforming and nonbinary students to their parents while the administrative complaints are pending, according to a release from Platkin’s office. Outing is when information about a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation is shared without their consent.
The lawsuits assert that the three policies violate the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, pertaining to the prohibition against discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. According to the Office of the Attorney General, the three school boards’ policies “expressly target transgender, gender non-conforming, and gender non-binary students by singling them out for differential treatment, requiring parental notification for those students but not their peers.”
Rapidly, Republican state legislators representing Legislative District 13 – which includes Middletown and Marlboro townships – fired back, releasing statements against the lawsuits.
State Sen. Declan O’Scanlon (R-13) described the state’s stance as “adversarial for the sake of doing so,” in a release issued by District 13 representatives. O’Scanlon justified the decisions made by school board members as they are elected officials that were chosen by their constituents. “If the parents of Middletown and Marlboro want to be informed about what their children are doing then they have that right,” he said.
State Assemblyman Gerry Scharfenberger said parents “have the right and duty to know everything” about their child, “particularly something as difficult as gender identity and sexual orientation.” And that “it is not up to the school to keep information from any parent or guardian.” Scharfenberger’s legislative partner, Assemblywoman Victoria Flynn, said she was “unclear why we have local boards of education if the State is just going to continue to unilaterally dictate how local communities manage the student-parental relationships.”
“These constant, adversarial approaches to this issue only serve to foster division and harm,” she said.
In District 11, which encompasses Colts Neck (a school district mulling revisions to its transgender student policy), Republican candidate for state Senate Steve Dnistrian voiced a similar stance, saying that families suffer when “Governor Murphy and Attorney General Matt Platkin try to interfere in the relationship between parents and children.”
Dnistrian is running against incumbent state senator Vin Gopal, a Democrat, in the upcoming November election.
While the three school board policies remain adopted, the lawsuits were filed on the heels of a similar suit in May, which challenged the Hanover Township Board of Education’s revision to its transgender student policy. As the Hanover school board’s policy remains in a legal deadlock, it is likely that the policies passed in Monmouth County will follow the same course.
The Colts Neck Board of Education was expected to vote on a similar parental notification policy at its June 28 meeting which took place after press time.
The article originally appeared in the June 29 – July 5, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
