Trump administration rescinds Fife Schools' discrimination settlement
A Washington school district's civil rights settlement with the Department of Education has been rescinded as part of the Trump administration's effort to redefine federal Title IX protections to exclude transgender students.
Fife Public Schools, in Pierce County, no longer has to abide by the 2024 agreement it made with the Department of Education after the agency investigated a student's claims of sex- and race-based discrimination by the district.
The Department of Education announced that it had rescinded portions of this settlement - and five others made under the Obama and Biden administrations - on April 6.
The settlements rescinded by the Trump administration include those made with Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware and Delaware Valley School District in Pennsylvania, as well as three institutions in California: La Mesa-Spring Valley School District, Sacramento City Unified School District and Taft College.
The department said the move aims to reverse the Obama and Biden administrations' interpretations of Title IX, a 1972 statute that forbids federally funded educational institutions from discrimination based on sex.
The Obama and Biden administrations interpreted Title IX to include protections based on a student's perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. The Trump administration has rejected those interpretations, and rescinded protections for transgender students.
"Prior Administrations regularly misinterpreted Title IX to pander to political ideology and police ‘misgendering' despite not having sound legal grounds," wrote Department of Education spokesperson Amelia Joy in an email to The Seattle Times. "With (these) actions, the Trump Administration is upholding the law and righting years of wrongs."
Most of the six settlements terminated by the Trump administration involve transgender students who reported experiencing harassment or hostile environments due to their gender identity, citing their schools' responses to their complaints as violations of Title IX.
But the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights' investigation into Fife Public Schools focuses on a sixth grader who reported being severely bullied by other students based on her race and sex. Publicly available files do not describe the student's gender identity.
The Department of Education spokesperson did not answer questions about why the Fife settlement was included with other cases that clearly pertain to transgender students, or about which portions of the settlement the agency will no longer enforce.
Fife Public Schools also did not respond by press time to The Times' inquiries about the department's rescinding of its settlement.
What this means for Washington
Regardless of the Trump administration's interpretation of federal civil rights laws, Washington state law forbids public schools from discriminating against students based on their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington. Students in Washington public schools have the right to use different names and pronouns.
Washington is also one of 23 states nationwide that either allow or do not prohibit transgender student athletes from participating on teams that are consistent with their gender identity, according to Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that researches LGBTQ+ rights.
Katy Payne, chief strategy officer at the office of superintendent of public instruction, said Washington schools "should continue to follow state and federal nondiscrimination laws."
"States are permitted to provide greater protections for students than what is required by federal minimum standards," Payne said. "Washington state law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression in public schools. Washington's laws fit squarely within the scope of what is allowed by federal law."
Trump's antitransgender crusade
Linda Mangel, a former enforcement director for the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, said that the rescindments were "an unusual step," but an unsurprising one given the Trump administration's other actions to curtail the rights of transgender students.
Mangel spent nearly two decades working at OCR in various roles, including under the administrations of President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden and both Trump administrations.
President Donald Trump has made targeting what he calls "gender ideology" a priority in his second term. An executive order issued on his first day in office directed federal agencies to amend all existing policies that reference "gender" to instead use the term "sex," which the order defines as an "immutable biological classification as either male or female."
Another executive order, from February 2025, aimed to revoke federal funds from schools that allow transgender girls and women to participate on female sports teams. The U.S. Supreme Court is also considering two cases involving a transgender girl and woman who are prohibited from competing on their schools' female sports teams because of state laws.
In January, the Office for Civil Rights also opened Title IX investigations into four Washington school districts that allow transgender students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
While differing legal interpretations from one presidential administration to the next aren't uncommon, rescinding agreements from prior administrations is striking, Mangel said.
"It's turning Title IX on its head," said Mangel, who also directed Seattle's regional OCR office from 2015 to 2024. "It's taking a law that was intended to protect students and advance opportunities and using it as a weapon to deny students access to opportunities."
She said the agency's decision means that transgender students are no longer able to seek recourse for harassment or sex-based discrimination under federal Title IX protections.
"It's making transgender students less safe. Basically, they're telling these students there's no place for them; they don't belong," Mangel said. "They're taking a really vulnerable population and making them more vulnerable by publicly declaring that they won't protect them."
What happened in Fife
The Office for Civil Rights' investigation centers on a sixth grader in Fife Public Schools who reported that she experienced racist, sexist and ableist harassment throughout the 2021-22 school year. In the complaint, she and her family assert that the district did not respond in accordance with federal law when notified of these reports.
Fife Public Schools includes six schools with a combined enrollment of about 3,900 students in Fife, Milton and Edgewood, according to the district's website.
According to federal documents, the student, who is white, took a DNA test and discovered that she had African ancestry. Excited, she shared this information with classmates and friends.
But in January 2022, multiple students bullied the student on social media. They called her racial slurs and other "derogatory names based on disability, sexual orientation and gender identity," according to the report, and they encouraged her to say racial slurs.
After the student's mother emailed the school about the bullying, the assistant principal reviewed screenshots of the social media posts and interviewed nine involved students. School staff disciplined specific students, and issued a "no-contact agreement" to prevent the nine students from communicating with the student during the school day. The school also moved the student into other classes and notified her teachers about the harassment.
But the bullying continued. Throughout the 2021-22 school year, the student often disclosed "hurtful and unkind statements" from other students, according to the report.
The assistant principal said she investigated each report of harassment but that none were based on the student's "perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, race, disability, or any other protected category," according to the report.
The Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that it had concerns about the district's response to the student's complaints of sex-, race- and disability-based bullying. As part of the 2024 settlement, the office required the school district to provide further training to staff and students about identifying and preventing various kinds of discrimination.
What comes next?
Payne, of the office of superintendent of public instruction, said that the federal Department of Education had not directly communicated with the state education agency about the April rescission. She added that the department had not clarified whether it had rescinded the settlement in full or in part.
Mangel said the Trump administration's "professed interest" in "protecting girls' sports" does not align with the investigations that the Office for Civil Rights is focusing on.
Instead of focusing on the nation's very small number of out transgender student athletes, Mangel said, the administration should turn toward resolving other Title IX athletics cases.
The Office for Civil Rights resolved zero Title IX sexual harassment or assault cases at K-12 schools in 2025 after Trump's inauguration, according to a study by the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. The Trump administration also attempted to fire more than half of the office's staff in 2025, a decision pending in court, and it shuttered seven of its 12 regional offices.
In January 2026, when the Department of Education announced 18 new Title IX investigations into educational institutions with trans-inclusive student athlete policies, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said: "We will leave no stone unturned in these investigations to uphold women's right to equal access in education programs."
But Mangel said the administration's actions fly in the face of its stated goal.
"If they care about girls having opportunities to participate in sports, they should do what their job is and resolve the Title IX athletics complaints they have sitting in their offices untouched," Mangel said.
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This story was originally published April 18, 2026 at 6:51 AM.