By: Emily Nixon
On April 6, the United States (U.S.) Department of Education (DOE) released a statement announcing that Title IX resolution agreements with six school systems would be canceled due to their “ideologically driven interpretation of Title IX.”
Resolution agreements are voluntary written agreements that outline the corrective actions a school district will take to handle the violations discovered by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR).
The agreements are issued when the OCR concludes its investigation into civil rights complaints against a specific educational entity and gives the entity a chance to change its policies to remedy the complaints. The agreements typically involve policy change/ new policy implementation and periodic check-ins with the OCR to ensure the changes are being made and are effective. The rescission has been unprecedented, according to The Hill.
“Resolution agreements are used by OCR (Office for Civil Rights) to require schools to take specific actions to resolve noncompliance with federal civil rights law,” stated the release. “They illegally saddled school districts with Title IX violations for actions such as ‘improper use of preferred pronouns’ or ‘asking questions about a student’s preferred ‘gender.’”
As previously reported by The Vanguard, Title IX is a federal civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education programs and activities at universities or school systems that receive federal funding.
Taft College (California), Cape Henlopen School District (Delaware), Delaware Valley School District (Pennsylvania), Fife School District (Washington), La Mesa-Spring Valley School District (California), and Sacramento City Unified (California) have had these resolutions nullified by the Trump Administration.
Taft College’s resolution included mandated staff training about using preferred names and “how refusing could create a hostile academic environment,” according to the New York Times (NYT). The La Mesa-Spring Valley School District’s resolution surrounded complaints of harassment of a non-binary student, according to the NYT.
The Delaware Valley School District’s resolution ensured training on gender-based discrimination, as well as dealing with complaints from a transgender student being forced to use the bathroom and locker rooms of their biological sex, according to the NYT.
Merely rescinding the agreements did not give the school districts the ability to maintain their protections for transgender students, according to the Associated Press (AP).
“The administration went further, requiring the [Delaware Valley School] district to roll back antidiscrimination protections for transgender students. The school board voted in late March to change its transgender student policies to abide by the Trump administration’s demands,” stated the article.
Administrators like Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, have voiced their concerns about the long-term effects this decision will have on future discrimination cases.
“This does take away the importance from the resolution agreements. If the message that school districts get is, well, we can enter into it now, but they could just be rescinded based on the political whim of a new administration, like, what force does it actually have then to actually prevent discrimination?” Patel told The Hill.
Patel has also criticized the DOE’s lack of activity regarding Title IX cases.
“Student sexual assault survivors who have filed Title IX complaints with OCR have been largely ignored by Assistant Secretary Richey and Education Secretary Linda McMahon. After dismantling much of its enforcement infrastructure last year, OCR resolved zero Title IX complaints of sexual harassment or violence in 2025 and has opened fewer than 10 Title IX sexual violence investigations since March 2025,” said Patel in a statement by the National Women’s Law Center.
Patel has harshly criticized the Trump administration’s DOE for the consequences of its inactivity.
“The fact that OCR has resolved zero sexual harassment and assault complaints while one in four women experience rape or sexual assault on college campuses proves what we have always known: Trump’s Department of Education is anti-student, anti-survivor, and anti-protecting women and girls,” said Patel in the statement.
Patel referenced former Attorney General Bondi’s failure to interview survivors of alleged pedophile ring-leader Jeffrey Epstein to highlight the gross mishandling of the Title IX cases by the DOE’s leadership.
“Just as Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice is ignoring Epstein survivors, [DOE Secretary Linda] McMahon and [OCR Assistant Secretary Kimberly] Richey are systemically ignoring student sexual violence survivors–all while using the few remaining resources of the gutted Department of Education to attack trans students’ Title IX rights, when these students are already vulnerable to experiencing discrimination and harassment,“, said Patel in the statement.
Patel sounded the alarm that rescinding these policies was only the start of a dangerous legislative slope.
“We should all be alarmed at the Trump administration’s cruel escalation of their anti-trans agenda. When they push laws that explicitly target trans people or attempt to use scientifically inaccurate language to define sex, they are also inevitably targeting all women and girls,” said Patel in a statement. “They want to control what we do, how we look, and how we act until we are pushed out of public life. But we are not going anywhere.”