Democrats told a state education board Monday that colleges and universities in Texas could lose billions of dollars in federal funds if they follow Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) order to ignore a new federal rule that strengthens protections against discrimination for LGBTQ students.
In a letter to Texas’s Higher Education Coordinating Board, the state agency in charge of public post-secondary education, four Democrats from the Texas House said that public colleges could violate students’ civil rights and lose government funding if they follow Abbott’s orders to ignore changes that the Education Department made in April to Title IX, the federal law that stops sex discrimination in schools and education programs that get government funding.
It is planned that the new rule, which covers discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time, will go into effect on August 1. However, federal judges have temporarily stopped enforcement in 10 states run by the GOP.
In April, Abbott wrote to President Biden and said that the changes were “illegal” and that his state would not make them happen.
The Democratic Reps. Sylvia Garcia, Al Green, and Sheila Jackson Lee signed the letter on Monday. It was led by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and says that Abbott and other public officials who have promised to reject the Biden administration’s rule are using schools as “political pawns.”
It was written by lawmakers that Texas colleges and universities are in a bad spot because of the unfair pressure from a Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General who are known for using the benefits of their jobs to punish people who don’t follow their biased political agenda.
The authors also said, “The consequences would be disastrous if Texas schools do not change their policies to reflect the upcoming Title IX changes.” “If institutions lost billions of dollars in federal funding, they wouldn’t be able to give most students the scholarships they need to go to college and pay for it.” In fact, the chances of going to school for hundreds of thousands of people who want to go to Texas would be lost.
Texas Democrats said that not following the administration’s new rule, which protects pregnant students from discrimination and changes how schools handle claims of sexual misbehavior, could also put students’ civil rights at risk.
They brought up a lawsuit that two professors from the University of Texas at Austin filed last month, which is against parts of the rule that let students miss school for abortions that happen outside of Texas and require schools to accept the pronouns of transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
They wrote, “This kind of biased, narrow-minded view is exactly the kind of harm that Title IX’s civil rights protections were made to stop.”
A federal judge earlier this month gave Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) a small win by stopping changes to Title IX that were similar to those suggested by the Biden administration in 2021.
Title IX is a federal law, but each administration has its way of following its rules. Schools have to follow these rules of each administration to get government money. Last month, Trump, who is running for re-election in November, said that he would undo the rule made by the Biden administration “on day one.”
Republicans in the House and Senate filed resolutions this month to disapprove of the new rule. They want to get rid of it before it goes into effect, and lawsuits are still being made against it in more than a dozen Republican-led states.
