Superintendent Demetrius Liggins included this rendering in his presentation to a legislative committee in Frankfort, Aug. 20, 2024.
Republican state lawmakers grilled the Fayette County Public Schools superintendent Tuesday over the design of restrooms in a new middle school, suggesting the district is trying to circumvent the anti-transgender law enacted by the GOP-controlled legislature last year.
However, Superintendent Demetrus Liggins told the Interim Joint Committee on Education that restrooms in the new Mary E. Britton Middle School were designed to increase student safety by preventing bullying and other bad behavior in restrooms — a problem that data shows has increased statewide. Liggins said the design decisions had nothing to do with the controversial Senate Bill 150, which also limited medical care for transgender minors.
“This has nothing to do with Senate Bill 150, but we can see from the data that when students are supervised, behavior incidents go down,” Liggins said in response to a question from Rep. Candy Massaroni, R-Bardstown. “That’s just common knowledge.”
Massaroni had asked if the design was “a way just to get around” the 2023 legislation that, among other provisions, bans people from using bathrooms, locker rooms or showers that “are reserved for students of a different biological sex” in schools.
The committee’s discussion, which lasted nearly an hour, signaled a renewal of Republican lawmakers’ conversations about preventing transgender students in Kentucky schools from using bathrooms of the gender they identify with.
Rep. Matt Lockett, R-Nicholasville, criticized what he called a gender-neutral restroom design in a presentation to the committee and called it an attempt to bypass requirements of the 2023 law.
The design features private stalls with floor-to-ceiling doors and an open communal sink area that can be observed and supervised from the hallway.
Liggins told lawmakers that the school’s principal has decided to segregate boys and girls into separate restroom areas. He said the new configuration will enable adults to better supervise “restrooms in general.”
The superintendent said the district’s advisory council on safety saw a need to address supervision of students in hallways and restrooms. Parents and other stakeholders also had a chance to participate in the design process, he said, without raising concerns about the restrooms design.
Liggins highlighted issues the school district faced from a 2021 TikTok trend inspiring damage and theft, mostly in boys’ bathrooms. He added that vandalism cost the district more than $42,000 in repairs. More recently, the school district and others across the nation are trying to prevent students from vaping or using electronic cigarettes in restrooms, Liggins added.
According to the Kentucky 2022-23 School Safety Report, schools have seen an increase in behavior events reported in bathrooms, with more than 15,000 that school year. In the 2018-19 school year, 4,980 behavior events in bathrooms were reported.
Henry Clay High School, which is part of Fayette County Public Schools, recently announced it would close restrooms during transitions between classes unless there is a medical need.
Lockett, whose district includes part of southern Fayette County, called on his fellow legislators to back a bill he had drafted that would require all Kentucky public schools with more than 100 students to have at least 90% of their restrooms designated for one gender — allowing the remaining 10% to be “all access restrooms.” He added that he welcomes input from others on his proposal. The General Assembly can take action on legislation when it reconvenes in January.
“We expect our schools to be safe, learning environments, not social experiments,” Lockett said. “We expect that our students shouldn’t be afraid or embarrassed, bullied or harassed in school. And at the end of the day, we want our public schools, including Fayette County, to be the best that they can be.”
Lockett referred to renderings of a “gender-neutral open-concept” restroom in Britton Middle School, which will open on Polo Club Boulevard near Hamburg in 2025.
Eunice Montfort, of Frankfort, addressed the committee as a concerned citizen. She said she has worked as a health care administrator and in the construction industry and “did encounter individuals who were transgendered” in both careers. She said she opposed “co-ed bathrooms” and thought they were “a terrible idea.”
In his remarks to the committee, Lockett presented a hypothetical situation where a sixth-grade girl tells her parents that she’s uncomfortable sharing a gender-neutral bathroom like the ones in the design with male classmates and faces embarrassment.
“She uses the restroom, possibly anyway, and enters a stall that a boy just came out of,” Lockett said. “There is urine all over the seat and floor of the stall — because we know how middle school boys are — and so this allows her experience to be even worse.”
Rep. Tina Bojanowski, D-Louisville, said that as an elementary school teacher, her perspective was “completely different than the perspective that Rep. Lockett brings.” She said when a fifth-grade class goes to the restroom, a teacher stands in the hall as kids line up to enter when a stall opens, but the students aren’t supervised in the closed-off restroom.
Bojanowski said she recently passed a class going to the bathroom at her school and a student told the teacher another child had punched them in the restroom, but “what can the teacher say? She is not in the room.”
“As an educator, I would applaud this design,” she said. “You can have a teacher or an adult standing, watching, sending the kids into the area one at a time to use the restroom in the enclosed stalls, and then they wash their hands and they come out, and you have … eyes on them every minute, except for when they understandably have their own privacy.”
A few lawmakers did ask some questions of presenters during the meeting, but Rep. Josie Raymond, D-Louisville, asked Committee Chairman Rep. James Tipton, R-Taylorsville, “why we needed to cut off questioning and rush the meeting” before going to the next item on the agenda.
“Because we have two more items on the agenda, plus about 12 or 13 administrative regulations to get through today,” Tipton said.
“I’m happy to stay. Anybody else?” Raymond said in reply. “Everybody happy to stay a little bit longer?”
Tipton said to Raymond he didn’t know “how long you’ve been in the General Assembly” and added that “you should know by now that we have time restraints on how long we can keep the room,” referring to the meeting room in the Capitol annex.
Raymond offered that she’s been a member of the legislature for six years. She then asked what event would be in the room next and when it started.
“Rep. Raymond, I’m just following the rules given to us by the LRC (Legislative Research Commission),” Tipton said. “And you’ve just caused us a delay.”
Raymond previously announced that she is not seeking reelection to the General Assembly to instead run for a seat on Louisville Metro Council.
Source Agencies
