MEAD, Wash. — A few weeks after President Donald Trump took office, the conservative school board leaders in this town near the Idaho border made a bet. 

They would pit one Washington against the other and see what happened.

For years, Democrats in control of the state had required every school district to have policies on the books that protect transgender students from bullying and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The Mead school board unanimously approved a policy in 2019 to comply with the state guidelines, with little comment. Board members at the time asked only about potential cost and whether the student dress code also needed to change.

In 2023, lingering frustration with Covid restrictions and a growing backlash to transgender rights helped propel conservatives onto the town’s school board, a dynamic similar to one that had played out in communities across the country. Then, last year, the state education department checked how many school district policies actually complied with Washington’s nondiscrimination laws. State officials found Mead’s needed updating on a few counts, such as staff training and when to use a student’s preferred pronouns.

The board had 30 days to correct its policy, according to a Feb. 21 notice from the state. Trump by then had already signed a pair of executive orders proclaiming there are only two genders and banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.

Taking their cue from a clear shift in White House policy, the Mead school board pleaded in a March 11 letter for help from the U.S. secretaries for education and justice.

“We find ourselves caught between conflicting directives that threaten not only our federal funding but also the rights and values of the families we serve,” the board wrote. “Refusal to comply could prompt state retaliation in the form of withheld state funding, further threatening our ability to serve students in need.”

It didn’t take long for the board’s gamble to pay off.

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The Mead school board’s letter — sent alongside complaints from several other Washington school districts — arrived just as the U.S. departments of Education and Justice prepared to launch a special investigations team to look into complaints of Title IX violations in colleges and schools.

Title IX, a federal civil rights law from 1972, prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, and some on the right argue that allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports improperly disadvantages and discriminates against cisgender females. (Research to suggest transgender athletes have an advantage in sports is limited and inconclusive.) The joint team would fast-track resolutions and include civil rights attorneys from both departments.

Their first target: the Office for Superintendent of Public Instruction, which oversees education for Washington state.

“OSPI has threatened to withhold funding to school districts that refuse to comply with the OSPI policies that violate Title IX and its implementing regulations,” the U.S. Department of Education said in an April 30 letter announcing the investigation. The letter cited complaints from Mead and a half dozen other districts.

The Hechinger Report, through open records requests, obtained thousands of pages of emails from the accounts of the Mead school board, its superintendent and other Washington school boards involved in the Title IX investigation. Their emails and interviews with conservative activists, elected officials, parents and educators across the state reveal a significant victory for school boards like Mead, which quietly strategized with a statewide network of parents and state Republican officials waiting for a shift in federal power before challenging Washington’s protections for transgender students. 

The federal probe also underscores the second Trump administration’s intent to leverage federal authority to undermine progressive policies in blue states, even as experts expect the courts to ultimately determine the legality of the administration’s interpretation of Title IX. Already, the administration has launched similar probes into education agencies in California and Maine.

In Mead, the federal involvement into local school policy alarmed some residents.

“It is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Alaura Miller, a recent graduate of the Mead School District, which serves a former railway town turned bedroom community of Spokane. She came out as transgender in her late teens. Now she’s in college with plans to become a mental health counselor for LGBTQ+ youth in eastern Washington.

“The school board’s emboldening the worst in people,” Miller said. “It’s not teaching community.”

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The escalation of this conflict to Washington, D.C., follows years of simmering tension between local conservatives and the overwhelming number of progressives who run the Evergreen State.

In 2007, it was the first state to adopt rules that allowed transgender students to participate in school sports and competitions that aligned with their gender identity. Lawmakers three years later explicitly included students in nondiscrimination laws, which count gender identity as a protected class. And in 2012, the state issued formal guidelines that protected locker and restroom access for transgender students.

Conservatives grumbled along the way. But they focused political attention elsewhere, including some early victories to block mandatory sex education in every grade and every school. Voters eventually established that mandate in a 2020 ballot measure.

The true firestorm arrived in 2023, with passage of a bill that would allow housing shelters to notify state authorities, not parents, when runaway youth seek refuge and gender-affirming care.

“That’s what started it all. That put parents’ rights on everyone’s radar, as under attack,” said David Spring, executive director of the Washington Parents Network, a statewide coalition that formed during the pandemic to protest school closures and mask mandates. 

By then, allies of Trump started to pay attention to Washington state.

The America First Legal Foundation, started by longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller, represented a group of parents who sued in 2023 to fight the new protections for transgender youth in crisis. Courts dismissed their lawsuit, but Spring’s coalition — and $16 million in political contributions — built momentum behind a 2024 ballot measure to create a “parents’ bill of rights.” The initiative, among other provisions, required schools to inform parents in advance of any medical services offered to their children. Proponents of the measure argue Democrats gutted it with a pair of student safety bills passed earlier this year.

A parents’ rights-focused slate of candidates, meanwhile, secured a 4-1 conservative majority in 2023 on the school board in Mead, where student enrollment hovers just above 10,000 students. About 2 in 5 students qualify as low income and nearly 4 in 5 identify as white.

The new board wasted little time before setting a clear agenda. “Voters made it clear tonight that they want a strong school board that represents parents,” Board President Michael Cannon, who won reelection, told local media at the time.

In February 2024, the board adopted a resolution opposing a state policy that would require curriculum inclusive of “the histories, contributions, and perspectives of historically marginalized groups,” including LGBTQ+ people, saying it subverted local control over education. The board also joined with its counterparts from two dozen other districts in a campaign to prohibit transgender athletes from playing on female sports teams.

The effort failed, but some residents took notice of a change in their community. One mother with students in Mead schools wrote to the board in December, sharing a statement from the Washington State LGBTQ Commission that condemned the board’s campaign.

“It sends a very clear message to our children that Mead does NOT support and include all students,” her email reads. Writing from her work email account, she identified herself as a state employee active with the LGBTQ+ resources group for public workers.

Alan Nolan, one of the new conservatives on the board, responded by notifying the mother’s employer that she may have broken laws against using government resources for personal matters.

“Are you aware of her activities?” Nolan wrote to her supervisors. Nolan declined interview requests for this story, instead referring The Hechinger Report to the board’s previous statements on the Title IX investigation.

Cannon, the board president, defended Nolan’s decision to contact the parent’s employer: “He was saying, ‘Quit trying to push us around by using your state title.’”

Cannon also disputed whether the board’s actions made any students or families feel unwelcome at Mead schools.

“That certainly is not the intention at all,” he said. “We want to make every student feel like they belong as much as any other student.”

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By then, Trump had reclaimed the White House — after his campaign and Republicans spent $215 million on anti-transgender advertising, according to tracking firm AdImpact. In the presidential election, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris commanded a nearly 20 percentage point lead in the overall Washington vote; in Spokane County, a slim majority of voters supported Trump.

Adrien Leavitt, staff attorney with the ACLU of Washington, said the GOP’s focus on transgender issues in the campaign trickled into local politics in places like Mead.

“When vitriol toward trans people became a nationwide talking point for the right to win the presidency, that invigorated a lot of people to invoke the same harmful rhetoric in their local communities,” Leavitt said. “We think of Washington as a liberal state. Nonetheless, it’s a very diverse state.”

OSPI, in its statewide civil rights review, required 59 out of 295 school districts in Washington to make corrections to their nondiscrimination policy, and 52 of them did so, according to agency data. Another 93 districts received notices to correct their gender-inclusive schools policy, but only 55 districts had as of earlier this year. 

After the November election, Spring’s statewide network of parents worked with school boards to prepare for a shift in “the other Washington.” Nearly two dozen boards started a campaign to reverse the state’s policy on transgender athletes, and a growing clash over student pronouns in one district accelerated their efforts. The network’s members met weekly on Zoom, and Spring in early February filed a federal complaint over Title IX before boards like Mead — roughly 30 in total, Spring estimated — soon followed.

“That’s a tenth of school districts doing this kind of revolt. School boards just want to run their schools,” he said.

In Mead, after the board learned it had 30 days to correct its transgender policy, Nolan shared details of the state’s findings with county and state GOP leaders and the Silent Majority Foundation, a conservative legal nonprofit in eastern Washington. In response to a mother with students in nearby Central Valley schools who asked the board for advice on how to join the fight, Nolan painted an ominous picture of the stakes: “OSPI and the legislature intend to threaten all districts to adopt policies well in excess of what state law requires or face loss of funding.”

Mead schools collect nearly $9 million in federal funding, or about 5 percent of its total budget; another 80 percent comes from the state. State code grants OSPI the authority to order the termination of funding to districts that violate nondiscrimination laws, but the agency has never withheld funding for noncompliance, according to spokeswoman Katy Payne. Still, the Mead school board cited the risk of losing funding — both state and federal — in its plea for help to the federal Education Department.

“It shouldn’t be a choice of which funding to lose,” Cannon told The Hechinger Report. “We just don’t want to risk any funding. That just can’t be on the table for us.”

Superintendent Travis Hanson, who declined several interview requests, said in an email that “culture-war conflicts” — specifically, the political shifts that lead to dramatic changes in local, state and federal education policy — have placed district leaders in an impossible position.

“The increasingly acrimonious debates on these issues are generally split along partisan lines and represent a complex situation for district leaders: navigating socio-political conflict we did not create but are nonetheless responsible for managing,” wrote Hanson, who joined the district in July 2023, just months before the election of the new slate of board members.

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In late March, the board took another step that further increased tensions: It proposed changes to the transgender policy — but not to comply with the state. Rather, the board would require students to get permission before using their preferred locker room or restroom and would not allow transgender students to room on overnight trips based on their preferred gender. School staff, under the changes, would not need a student’s permission before telling their parents about their gender identity.

A transgender student at Mead High School wrote to the board urging members considering the issue to be sensitive to students “who may rely on school to be their one safe space.”

Nolan replied first by stating his appreciation for the student’s willingness to engage in a civil discussion, but then he issued a vague warning to the teenager.

“I don’t know the source of your gender confusion nor will I pretend I can provide a solution to resolve it,” Nolan told the student. “Fooling yourself to believe you can become that sex is a dangerous lie and those who have bought into it often pay a heavy price.”

The student’s mother responded within hours.

She balked at Nolan’s allusion to a “heavy price” and called him presumptuous and patronizing for commenting on her child’s gender identity.

“We deliberately chose to live within the Mead school district upon recommendation from other family members — a decision I am increasingly questioning,” the mother wrote. “You can’t just wish away kids who are different, and deliberately isolating or driving away families like mine will come with its own heavy price.”

Nolan shared the emails with Cannon, and later sent the mother an apology.

“While we may hold different views on the matter, my response should have been more thoughtful in its tone as it is understandably a topic of significant personal importance,” he wrote. 

Related: A principal lost her job after she came out. Her conservative community rallied around her

Other residents praised the board, casting it as their ally in a fight against encroaching state mandates.

One couple with a young daughter wrote: “They have exceeded government outreach for far too long and it is time to take back local control, as the system was designed.”

In the interview with Hechinger, Cannon agreed. And he argued conservatives in Washington state have only acted on the defense.

“The irony is that we’re responding to what they’re doing,” he said of Democrats. “They’ve used the Legislature to force school districts to adhere to their political ideology. None of this originated with these conservative school boards that they like to vilify.”

Trump has continued to wield federal authority over states on Title IX and other issues, even while he has pledged to return control of education to individual states and communities and signed an executive order in March to do so. Later that month, newly confirmed Education Secretary Linda McMahon previewed the investigations to come.

In a Dear Colleague letter to superintendents, McMahon raised concerns about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a law that protects the personal records of students, and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), which gives parents the right to review instructional materials. The letter argued that some states and districts had turned “the concept of privacy on its head” and used the laws to prevent parents from knowing if their child started transitioning at school.

The investigation into Washington state hinges on allowing transgender students to compete in female sports but also potential violations of those student privacy laws. Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, described the administration’s legal reasoning as going beyond what Congress intended.

“This investigation looks like the latest instance of the Trump administration weaponizing its ability to withhold federal funds to enforce its ideological agenda,” Laird said.

In an email, an Education Department spokesperson said only that the investigation into Washington state was ongoing. The Justice Department declined to comment.

Related: Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration?  

Chris Reykdal, the Washington state schools chief, described the federal government’s use of the privacy provisions as an attempt to mandate discrimination.

“My office will enforce our current laws as we are required to do until Congress changes the law and/or federal courts invalidate Washington state’s laws,” Reykdal said in a statement. “Unless, and until that happens, we will be following Washington state’s laws, not a president’s political leanings expressed through unlawful orders.”

Some states and districts have already faced consequences from similar investigations. In Maine, the U.S. Department of Agriculture — in a related Title IX investigation — froze federal money meant to feed children in schools, daycares and after-school programs. The state sued, and won a court-approved settlement to stop the freezing of funds. The Trump administration has initiated similar investigations and funding fights in California and in 10 school districts, in Colorado, Kansas and Virginia.

Spring, with the statewide parents network in Washington, did not exactly celebrate the federal intervention in so many school districts. He’s a conservative who prefers local control, especially of education, but said state laws and rights can’t supersede federal law at the schoolhouse.

“We right now have a state ordering school districts around, to break federal law,” Spring said.

Related: At Moms for Liberty national summit, a singular focus on anti-trans issues 

Ultimately, courts are likely to continue weighing in on whether these federal actions can be enforced. Conflicting rulings in the federal judiciary, however, make it difficult to predict the outcome. 

Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which includes Washington state, barred Idaho from enforcing a ban — the first in the nation — on transgender athletes participating in girls’ and women’s sports teams. The 4th Circuit, also last year, ruled that a similar ban in West Virginia violated Title IX. 

Then, this year, the Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to the transgender rights movement, deciding in a 6-3 split that states can prohibit gender-affirming medical care for minors. A Trump-appointed judge in Tennessee also scrapped a set of Title IX rules that former President Joe Biden’s administration proposed to strengthen protections for LGBTQ+ students. And on its upcoming docket, the Supreme Court will hear two cases on whether bans on transgender women in sports violate the Constitution. 

“Trump and the alt-right folks want to suggest that civil rights are a zero-sum game,” said Hunter Iannucci, counsel with the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit legal group. “They’re trying to position this so Title IX operates only for those students, or only these students can have rights, and that’s just not accurate.”

Back in Mead, the school board in April paused consideration of its contested updates to the transgender policy. Board members continued to hear from both angry and approving members of the public until deciding, in May, to indefinitely postpone any formal action until the federal departments finish their Title IX investigation. The board meetings and especially portions for public comment have been largely quiet since then.

But Miller, the recent Mead graduate, still attends the meetings to speak on behalf of transgender students who remain in the district.

“There are people in the community willing to stand up,” she said. “Even though we’re scared of violence and discrimination, we still have a voice. We still exist.”

Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at morton@hechingerreport.org.

This story about Title IX was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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