Pennsylvania school covers surveillance windows in gender-neutral bathrooms

A Pennsylvania school district covered surveillance window openings in gender-neutral bathrooms on Thursday after heeding the advisement of lawyers.

In August, the South Western School District board, which has a conservative lean, voted 6-3 in favor of windows being installed in two gender-neutral bathrooms at Emory H. Markle Middle School in Hanover, more than a two-hour drive west of Philadelphia. The windows, which were not installed in any of the school’s gendered bathrooms, were designed to monitor and prevent misbehavior, according to the board’s president, Matthew A. Gelazela, who was elected as a Libertarian in 2021.

The windowpane had not yet been installed when the openings were covered by plywood on Thursday after lawyers from the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center—a conservative legal group the board consulted before the vote—advised them to do so, the school district’s superintendent, Jay Burkhart, said on Friday.

“I believe that we have to protect all of our students,” Burkhart told the Associated Press (AP). “Students are entitled to privacy and I don’t want to violate that.”

When the AP contacted Gelazela for comment Friday, he said he considered the call to be criminal harassment and hung up. He did, however, give a statement to the Evening Sun of Hanover, Pennsylvania, in which he cited student safety concerns as the reasoning behind the windows.

Gelazela said that “in making the area outside of stalls more viewable, we are better able to monitor for a multitude of prohibited activities such as any possible vaping, drug use, bullying or absenteeism.”

He added that students “should not consider the space outside of our stalls as private within the multiuser restrooms.”

The York Dispatch reported Friday that the board last year unanimously approved the creation of five different bathrooms: male and female based on sex assigned at birth; male and female based on gender identity; and single-user, gender-neutral. The window openings, which cost $8,700, were in the bathrooms designated for usage based on gender identity. According to the Evening Sun, work on the windows had already begun when the August vote was taken.

At least 11 states have created laws banning transgender girls and women from using female bathrooms at public schools and in some instances other government facilities.

The Education Law Center, a Philadelphia-based group that advocates for quality education for Pennsylvania public school students, wrote in a January analysis that federal appeals courts have ruled students have a right to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity.

Reaction to School Board’s Decision

Kristina Moon, lawyer with the Education Law Center, said that the South Western School District’s board “has been targeting transgender students and stripping away their rights for a while,” adding that “multiple tiers and assignments” of bathrooms “overcomplicated a nonissue,” which has stigmatized students.

“Now they’ve cut actual holes for windows into the student bathrooms—but only the bathrooms they expect trans and nonbinary children to use. This is a horrifying violation of children’s privacy and cruel discrimination targeted against trans and nonbinary kids,” Moon told the AP.

Jennifer Holahan, mother of an eighth grader at Markle, called the decision to cover up the windows “a small victory” but said she’s “nervous to see” what happens when the school board meets next week.

“This has been a continuing agenda that they’ve had,” Holahan told the AP. “They’ve proved this more than once. I think this is the first time that the school board president has been shut down. And I just wonder what’s to come from that.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania told the AP that the school board’s policy is discriminatory and makes children less safe.

This article includes reporting from the Associated Press.