The mass layoffs, part of Trump’s plan to eliminate the Education Department, fell particularly hard on the civil rights office, which lost more than half its staff and currently has a backlog of more than 25,000 discrimination cases. Despite that, Ritchey said she is “always going to advocate” for the office to have “the resources and tools it needs to do its job,” while at the same time calling out only those types of cases prioritized by the administration.  

“If I am confirmed, the department will not stand idly by while Jewish students are attacked and discriminated against,” Richey said. “We will stop forcing schools to let boys and men into female sports and spaces,” she continued, referring to inclusive school policies that allow transgender students to participate in school athletics and use restroom facilities that align with their gender identities.  

Richey led the civil rights office on an interim basis during Trump’s first term amid COVID’s widespread disruptions and she also worked for the office under President George. W. Bush.  She is to deny civil rights protections to transgender youth, promote school choice and parental rights, crack down on curriculum that focuses on racism, and weed out diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. 

During Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers put particular emphasis on Richey’s record involving LGBTQ+ youth, with Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin pointing to where more than half of these students reported experiencing discrimination at school.

“These kids are in dire need of protection against discrimination,” Baldwin said. “If confirmed, I hope you will act in the best interest of all children.”

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a retired college football coach from Alabama, described permitting transgender students to compete in school sports as “a huge problem” and dangerous. 

Richey, a former basketball player, said she would have had to sit out had transgender students been allowed to participate in school sports when she was a student.  

“I could not have competed against biological men, it’s just not something that I would have been able to do,” she said. 

The Trump administration maintains that policies allowing transgender students to participate in school sports “actually violated Title IX because they deprive women and girls of the opportunity to participate in athletics.” 

“I’m very proud of the way the secretary and the president have prioritized this issue, and I’m certainly committed to vigorously enforcing it and continuing to pursue these cases,” Richey said. 

Richey’s interim stint leading the civil rights office included the Trump administration’s response to a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision extending anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ+ employees in the workplace. The administration the ruling did not apply to schools under Title IX, the federal law prohibiting gender discrimination. 

The Biden administration then based much of its rewrite of Title IX regulations around that same Supreme Court decision, instructing schools to allow transgender students to use restrooms and pronouns that match their gender identity. The rule, no longer in effect, sparked lawsuits from red states and hard-right parent groups like Moms for Liberty.  

Special education cases personal

In 2021, near the end of her interim leadership, Richey into allegations that the state of Indiana and three districts — Fairfax County, Virginia, Los Angeles and Seattle — failed  to provide special education services during the COVID school shutdowns. Both the Los Angeles and Fairfax probes resulted in agreements to make up for missed services. 

Richey said her commitment to protecting the civil rights of children with disabilities reflects her own learning experiences. She was diagnosed with a brian tumor nearly 20 years ago, she explained, and relied on federal protections to access educational programs. 

“I know firsthand the importance and the significance of our civil rights laws and there’s no greater work than leading an agency responsible for ensuring that students get the services they need,” Richey said. 

Whether the Education Department will be capable of fulfilling that mission is now being fought over in court. On Tuesday, an appeals court to lift an injunction stopping it from further dismantling the department and ordering it to reinstate more than a thousand Education Department employees who lost their jobs. The administration has said it will appeal to the Supreme Court. 

Earlier this year, the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law filed a separate lawsuit against the Education Department, alleging specific staff reductions at the civil rights office rendered it incapable of carrying out civil rights enforcement efforts mandated by Congress, with particular harm to students of color, female students and LGBTQ+ youth.

Johnathan Smith, the center’s chief of staff and general counsel, dismissed any assertion that the administration was interested in protecting students’ civil rights. 

“Nothing about this confirmation changes the fact that this administration has consistently gutted OCR by laying off staff, by closing regional offices and by sending the message that discrimination just simply isn’t a priority for them and their work,” he told The 74 this week.

Combating antisemitism to remain a top focus

Richey’s appointment has largely been embraced by conservative groups like the American Enterprise Institute. In , the think tank lauded the nominee for her role in “ambitious reform efforts” in Virginia and Florida, and urged her to end the “Biden-Harris team’s unconscionable ‘catch and release’ approach to antisemitism, where some of the worst offenses in decades were treated with indifference.” 

On Wednesday, the Office for Civil Rights that the institution violated federal anti-discrimination laws and had “acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students.” Also on Wednesday, the Trump administration from entering the country to attend Harvard University as the administration cracks down on the institution over its response to protests during the 2023-24 school year over the Israel-Gaza war. 

Richey said Thursday that antisemitism has intensified at U.S. institutions in recent years and the civil rights office will continue to prioritize efforts to combat it. 

Meanwhile, Democrats accused the Trump administration during Thursday’s hearing of opening a slew of civil rights cases — including allegations of antisemitism on university campuses — primarily motivated by politics. 

The administration has also sought to revoke the visas and deport international students for their , their and expressing opinions in their . 

Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, asked Richey if she would object to actions that “do not afford due process” to students and charged the Trump administration with “treating American freedom and dissent as the enemy.” 

“Do you endorse ripping funding from researchers and students, stealing educational opportunity from international students, abducting students from campuses for asserting their First Amendment rights and continuing to threaten colleges and universities that refuse to comply with lawless demands?” Markey asked. 

In response, Richey stated simply she would “commit to following OCR’s regulations and OCR’s case processing manual.”  

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is expected to vote in the coming weeks on Richey’s nomination before it moves to the full Senate for confirmation. 

A group of parents sued the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, arguing that requiring children to sit through storybook readings on topics such as a and a girl giving to another girl offends their religious beliefs.

“We were forced to choose between God and education,” said Billy Moges, a Christian mother of three and a board member for Kids First, an advocacy group that formed to oppose the district’s move. She pulled her children out of the school system when officials ended the opt-out policy and has since started a private Christian school, , that meets in a Silver Spring church. 

“We’re not asking for any special treatment,” she said. ‘We’re asking for our rights to be restored.”

Regardless of who wins, the case will head back to the district court for further action.

The appeal centers on parents’ request to reinstate the opt-out policy until the district court can rule on whether the district violated their rights. But the court’s conservative majority may also use the oral arguments to address the underlying facts, said Joshua Dunn, executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“The school board didn’t relent, and then compelled students to sit through these books being read,” he said. “I just think that for some of the justices on the court, that’s going to strike them as extraordinarily wrong-headed.” 

District officials say the books, intended for pre-K through third grade, were never intended to push views about sex and gender. The opt outs, they argue, became increasingly disruptive and contributed to absenteeism because some parents let their children skip the whole day if a lesson included one of the books. 

Opt-outs “stigmatized LGBTQ students and students who have LGBTQ families,” said Aditi Fruitwala, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which supports the district. Reinstating the policy, she said, would “undermine the entire purpose of a public education system, which is to create good citizens who can thrive in a society with people from a variety of backgrounds, faiths and cultures.” 

The case, , illustrates the growing tension between inclusion and religious freedom. That’s likely the reason the conservative-learning court agreed to hear the appeal, Fruitwala said. The parents who sued — Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox Christian — also have the : Solicitor General John Sauer will participate in the oral arguments. In a brief, the Department of Justice said the board’s policy forces parents to be in “dereliction of their religious duties” by sending their children to public school. Twenty-six Republican-led states and 66 members of Congress also support the parents. 

Religiously diverse

Over the past few years, confrontations over these issues have escalated in districts across the country. In February, parents in the , district, near Rochester, objected to the district’s use of The Rainbow Parade, a picture book about a young girl and her two mothers attending a Pride parade. 

Nationally, the public leans in favor of schools allowing parents to opt their children out of lessons about sexual orientation and gender identity. Fifty-four percent agreed with that view in a Pew Research poll , but the partisan divide was stark: Support for opt outs was 79% among Republicans, compared with 32% among Democrats.

Despite clashes over such materials from to , both sides of the conflict agree that Montgomery County offers an especially apt setting for the debate. The county is one of the most in the nation, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. 

Will Haun, senior counsel at Becket, a law firm that focuses on religious liberty and represents the parents, said it’s “astonishing,” that such a district would abandon the longstanding practice of accommodating parents’ opt-out requests. 

Fruitwala said the district’s rich religious and diversity is precisely why the books belong in the curriculum. District leaders, she said, have an “opportunity to incorporate books from a wide variety of cultures and perspectives and backgrounds that reflect the families in the school district.” 

The 160,000-student district’s effort to bring more diversity to its reading program began in 2022-23, when the school board voted to add six books featuring LGBTQ characters. Officials said they chose the titles for the same reasons they would add any storybooks to the curriculum — to teach sentence structure, word choice and style.

In a brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the National Education Association and its Maryland and Montgomery County affiliates highlighted comments from teachers that demonstrated students’ eager response to the books. 

A veteran second grade teacher relayed what happened when she read , a picture book about a mother who makes a rainbow-colored wig for her transgender daughter. “Upon hearing the words, ‘I’m a transgender girl,’ one of the children in my class called out, ‘That’s like my sister!’ This child felt seen,” the teacher said, according to the brief.

Ignoring LGBTQ families, district leaders say, puts schools at risk of violating state that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. 

The ruled that refusing to allow children to opt out of the readings put no burden on religious parents. That’s when the families appealed to the Supreme Court.

They argue that since the district permits families to opt their children out of sex education, under a state law, that choice should extend to books that represent LGBTQ themes in other subjects. 

“All the school board had to do,” Haun said, “was simply recharacterize sexuality and gender instruction as English language arts and they get out of a long-standing national consensus that allows parents to opt their children out of that kind of instruction.”

Last fall, the district in question — My Rainbow and , a rhyming alphabet book about a puppy that runs off during a Pride parade. But Rev. Rachel Cornwell, a Methodist minister who has two students in Montgomery County schools, said she wouldn’t be surprised if the district was forced to remove all of the storybooks.

She wishes the parents would suggest different books rather than leave the district. 

“I think the vast majority of people in Montgomery County support the inclusion of these books into the curriculum,” she said. “These are not books about sex. They are books about people’s lives and about the diversity of our community.” 

As the mother of a transgender son, she said she and other LGBTQ families want their children to feel like they belong.

“We’re not trying to indoctrinate anybody or say this is right or wrong,” she said. “That’s for you to have a conversation about with your kid at home.”

With schools continuing to find themselves caught in emotional debates over students’ access to controversial books, the U.S. Department of Education has hired a new official to oversee its response to content challenges and take action if it finds that removing materials violated students’ civil rights.  

Matt Nosanchuk, a former Obama administration official and nonprofit leader whose work has focused on the Jewish and LGBTQ communities, started his job Monday as a deputy assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights. In the coming weeks, he’ll lead training sessions for schools and libraries on the shifting legal landscape related to restricting books available to students. The American Library Association will host the  Sept. 26.

“Across the country, communities are seeing a rise in efforts to ban books — efforts that are often designed to empty libraries and classrooms of literature about LGBTQ people, people of color, people of faith, key historical events and more,” a department official said in an email to reporters Thursday. “These efforts are a threat to student’s rights and freedoms.”

The move comes as conservative groups continue to push for the removal of books they argue are inappropriate for students and GOP leaders take action against districts with books that include sexual content or discuss historical racism. 

“The Department of Education has decided to lawlessly leverage its civil rights enforcement power to coerce school districts into keeping pornography in their libraries,” said Max Eden, a research fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. 

, an advocacy organization, found almost 1,500 instances of book bans affecting 874 unique titles last school year. In many cases, parents complained that the books were too advanced or graphic for younger readers. But civil rights officials say removing a book just because it has LGBTQ characters or discusses racial violence is a form of discrimination.

In a first-of-its-kind resolution in May, the department found that a Georgia district may have created a “hostile environment” when it withdrew several books with LGBTQ and Black characters following parent complaints. The agreement required the Forsyth County Schools to notify students of its library book review process and survey middle and high school students about harassment based on race or sex and whether they feel comfortable reporting it. 

Some parent leaders applauded the appointment. 

“Leadership and energy on this has been a long time coming,” said Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union. She hopes “to see real action and resources for children, parents and families who have been caught in the crossfire of this hate-filled political campaign for far too long.”

In Florida, for example, a new states that districts must remove books that contain “sexual conduct” if the material is determined to be inappropriate. Those who disagree with a district’s decision to keep a book on the shelves can ask for a review by a special magistrate.

“That’s one more level of control from the state to overturn what they don’t like,” said Melissa Erickson, executive director of Alliance for Public Schools, a nonprofit. She’s expressed concerns about the ability of conservative-leaning school boards to dictate what’s taught in the classroom.

In 2021, some parents in the Williamson County, Tennessee, district sought to remove the children’s book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story,” an autobiography about Bridges’s experience as the first Black student to desegregate an all-white school in New Orleans. They objected to the word “injustice” and a reference to “a large crowd of angry white people.”

In Oklahoma, the state that said officials can downgrade a district’s accreditation if it has books with “sexualized content” that an average person might find unfit for students. The rule followed state Superintendent Ryan Walters’s claims that some included books such as “Gender Queer” and “Flamer” that feature graphic illustrations of sex. In several cases, the books had already been removed.

Some advocates say they’ve been unfairly criticized for supporting the rights of parents to restrict their children from access to explicit material.

“When people ask questions they’re crucified,” Nicki Neily, president and founder of Parents Defending Education, testified Tuesday in a . “Pretending that objections to minors accessing explicit sexual content is a threat to liberty and literature is a straw man and a distraction from real concerns about the quality of children’s education and whether students are safe in school.”

Margaret Crespo, superintendent in residence for ILO Group, an organization that supports women leaders in education, said Nosanchuk’s hiring is likely to rankle those who think the federal government should stay out of local school board matters.

She resigned in August as superintendent of the Laramie County School District 1, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where board members pushed for a policy in which books with sexually explicit content would be off limits unless to children without parents’ prior permission. The school board is .  

But Crespo acknowledged the department’s assistance could be helpful to districts.

“Many don’t have policy or state statute to guide the conversation,” she said, “and are struggling to meet the needs of all students.”

The U.S. Department of Education on Monday abruptly disbanded a parent council created to include families in federal decisions about pandemic recovery efforts.

That action led conservative parent groups to drop a contentious lawsuit filed in July against Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, arguing members he picked to serve on the council only represented liberal-leaning organizations.

The department “has decided to not move forward with the National Parents and Families Engagement Council,” according to a statement. “The Department will continue connecting with individual parents and families across the country, including through townhalls, and providing parents and families with a wide array of tools and resources to use to support our students.”

One of the driving forces behind the council’s creation had harsh words for the department Monday, saying it “folded like a deck of cards in a moment that called for leadership.”

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, another group on the council, said both the plaintiffs and the department claimed to be acting in the interests of parents, “but in actuality neither have done anything tangible to prove it” and were using parents “as pawns in their convoluted culture wars.”

The department announced the council in June, with plans for an initial meeting before the new school year. Parent representatives were expected to share their experiences with remote learning and thoughts on how to help students get back on track academically and emotionally.

But plans remained idle after Parents Defending Education, Fight for Schools and Families and America First Legal Foundation filed their suit. The three plaintiffs argued that the council violated a federal law that requires official advisory committees to include diverse viewpoints and for the department to publicly announce meetings. Department of Justice attorneys countered that the council was meant to act more as a “sounding board” and was not intended to serve in an advisory capacity.

In September, Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia agreed with the plaintiffs on some points, but told the parties to gather more information on the council’s actual duties. If they did not meet a Monday deadline to provide that information, Lamberth promised to dismiss the case.

On Friday, five Republican senators joined the fray, sending Cardona that echoed the concerns expressed in the lawsuit. 

“The uniformly partisan members of the Council demonstrate this administration’s commitment to putting the interest of unions, teachers and non-education associations, and the radical left above students and parents,” according to the letter. It was signed by Sen. Bill Cassidy, slated to become ranking member of the Senate education committee, Sen Richard Burr of North Carolina, the current ranking Republican, and three others. 

The senators noted that President Joe Biden spoke at of the National Action Network, one of the groups chosen to serve on the council, and that LaWanda Toney, a former official at the National PTA, another organization represented, has been in the department.

They asked Cardona how the organizations were chosen, whether officials communicated with representatives over issues such as mask mandates and critical race theory, and if there was any requirement that participants have “human children.”

“Mitt Romney has met my children,” said Rodrigues of the National Parents Union, referring to one the GOP signers. She initially called the letter “a last gasp effort” to keep the lawsuit alive, but that was before the department abandoned its plans.

The administration had two options — “disband its parent council or allow for viewpoint diversity on the council,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said in a . “They chose to disband it. It’s telling but not surprising that they chose ideology and groupthink over a balanced representation of views.”

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