The future that the Trump administration envisions for public schools is more patriotic, more Christian and less “woke.” Want to know how that might play out? Look to Oklahoma.

Oklahoma has spent the past few years reshaping public schools to integrate lessons about Jesus and encourage pride about America’s history, with political leaders and legislators working their way through the conservative agenda for overhauling education.

Academics, educators and critics alike refer to Oklahoma as ground zero for pushing education to the right. Or, as one teacher put it, “the canary on the prairie.”

By the time the second Trump administration began espousing its “America First” agenda, which includes the expansion of private school vouchers and prohibitions on lessons about race and sex, Oklahoma had been there, done that.

The Republican supermajority in the state Legislature — where some members identify as Christian nationalists — passed sweeping restrictions on teaching about racism and gender in 2021, prompting districts to review whether teachers’ lessons might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish” or other psychological distress about their race. The following year, it adopted one of the country’s first anti-transgender school bathroom bills, requiring students to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with the gender they were assigned at birth or face discipline.

While he was state schools superintendent, Ryan Walters demanded Bibles be placed in every classroom, created a state Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism, and encouraged schools to use online “pro-America” content from conservative media nonprofit PragerU. He called teachers unions “terrorist” organizations, railed against “woke” classrooms, threatened to yank the accreditation of school districts that resisted his orders and commissioned a test to measure whether teacher applicants from liberal states had “America First” knowledge.

Many of the changes endorsed by the state’s leaders have elements of Christian nationalism, which holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and often downplays troubling episodes in the country’s history to instead emphasize patriotism and a God-given destiny.

Walters, who declined to comment for this story, resigned at the end of September and became CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance, an arm of the conservative think tank Freedom Foundation that aims to “fight the woke liberal union mob.” But much of the transformation in Oklahoma education policy that he helped turbocharge is codified in the state’s rules and laws.

“We are the testing ground. Every single state needs to pay attention,” warned Jena Nelson, a moderate Democrat who lost the state superintendent’s race to Walters in 2022 and is now running for Congress.

ProPublica has reported that Education Secretary Linda McMahon has brought in a team of strategists who are working to radically shift how children will learn in America, even as they carry out the “final mission” to shut down the federal agency. Some of those strategists have spoken of their desire to dismantle public education. Others hope to push it in the same direction as Oklahoma.

Walters tapped the president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that published Project 2025 and the blueprints that preceded it, to help rewrite Oklahoma’s social studies standards. The Legislature did not reject the rewrite, so the standards now include roughly 40 points about the Bible, Jesus and Christianity that students should learn as well as skepticism about the 2020 presidential election results and the origins of COVID-19. If the new standards survive a legal challenge, they could be in place until they’re up for review again in six years.

But while Oklahoma made these shifts, it has consistently ranked near the bottom on national measures of student performance. Scores on eighth grade reading and math in national evaluations are abysmal. Only New Mexico’s proficiency rates rank lower. The high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the country, while spending on education is one of the lowest. Only three other states — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — spend less per pupil. And in the most recent federal data about average teacher pay, Oklahoma tied with Mississippi for dead last. Many school superintendents and parents say state leaders have been fixated on the wrong things if the goal is to improve schools.

“The attention to the culture war thing means that there’s a lot of distraction from the basic needs of kids being met,” said Aysha Prather, a parent who has closely followed changes in state education policy. Her transgender son is a plaintiff in a 2022 lawsuit challenging the state’s bathroom ban. That case remains on appeal.

“The school should be the nicest, happiest, best resourced place in a community,” she added. “That’s how we show that we value kids. And that is obviously not how most of our Legislature or state government feels about it.”

In a statement to ProPublica, the new state superintendent, Lindel Fields, said that he’s sorting through previous rules and edicts that have created “much confusion” for schools, including about the standards and the PragerU teacher certification tests. He said the public rightfully has questions about how the state Education Department changes after Walters’ tenure, but “given all these pressing tasks, we simply don’t have time for looking backward. Whether we are 50th or 46th or 25th in education, we have work to do to move our state forward,” Fields wrote. He said his first tasks are “resolving a number of outstanding issues that are hindering operations” including creating a budget for the agency.

Public school superintendents do not oppose all of the mandates from the past several years. When Walters directed schools last year to place Bibles in every classroom and teach from them, one district superintendent emailed to thank him for offering “cover” to incorporate Bible-focused lessons, according to news reports.

Another superintendent, Tommy Turner of Battiest Public Schools, said students at his schools have always had access to the Bible. The district still puts on a Christmas program and observes a moment of silence to start the day, and the school board prays before meetings.

“Christ never left the school,” he said in an interview in his office.

A lifelong Republican who works in a remote stretch of southeast Oklahoma, Turner said he is concerned about the state’s priorities and doesn’t see Bibles as the most pressing issues.

In his district, the cafeteria needs repairs even after the emergency replacement of a roof that had a gaping hole in it. Many of his teachers work second jobs on weekends because the pay’s so low. Nail heads are poking through the gym’s thin hardwood floors. The district has lost 15% of its students to an online charter school and homeschooling. Voters have rejected three bond issues in a row for building repairs and renovations.

Turner said he’d like to retire, but he loves the students and wants to protect his little district. He put on his cowboy hat, apologized for the pile of dead wasps on his office floor — the infestations barely register anymore — and walked over to the high school. He said he hadn’t even read the new social studies standards.

“I don’t have time to chase every rabbit,” he said. “I’ve got a school to run.”

Patriotism and Jesus

The changes to Oklahoma’s curriculum rules don’t just touch on national issues around race and gender. Here, teachers aren’t supposed to tell students that the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — a defining incident of racial violence in Oklahoma history — was perpetrated by racists.

State social studies standards for years have included discussion of how white Tulsans murdered as many as 300 Black people. But once the 2021 state law that restricted teaching about race and gender passed, some teachers avoided the topic.

The law prohibits teachers from singling out specific racial groups as responsible for past racism. It specifies that individuals of a certain race shouldn’t be portrayed as inherently racist, “whether consciously or unconsciously.” In addition to teachers’ licensure being on the line, repeated failure to comply would allow the state to revoke district accreditation, which could result in a state takeover.

When educators questioned how to teach about a race massacre without running afoul of the law, state legislators and the Tulsa County chapter of the conservative parent group Moms for Liberty weighed in to say that white people today shouldn’t feel shame and that the massacre’s perpetrators shouldn’t be cast as racists. A Moms for Liberty chapter representative did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

At a speaking engagement at the Norman Public Library in 2023, Walters suggested teachers present the facts about the murders but should not say “the skin color determined it.” Even two years after the law went into effect, news reports said teachers were still treading lightly on the race massacre, wary of the state suspending or revoking their licenses for exposing students to prohibited concepts. Those fears are not hypothetical; the state has revoked at least one teacher’s license and suspended two others’.

Other historic episodes that reveal racism also are getting a new look in Oklahoma through the state’s partnership with PragerU Kids, which creates short-form videos to counter what its founder believes is left-wing ideology in schools.

Teachers in the state aren’t required to use the videos, but some like them and show them in class. The videos align with conservatives’ push to teach a positive view of America’s past and with the state’s rules on teaching about race and gender. For instance, PragerU Kids’ version of Booker T. Washington’s story is a cheery lesson in self-sufficiency and acceptance. Once freed from slavery, Washington toiled in coal mines, worked as a janitor in exchange for formal education and became a great American orator and leader of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

The video does not linger on his being born into “the most miserable, desolate and discouraging surroundings” or, as he wrote in his autobiography, that slavery was “a sin that at some time we shall have to pay for.”

“America was one of the first places on Earth to outlaw slavery,” a cartoon version of Washington tells two time-traveling children in the PragerU video, so “I am proud and thankful.” (The U.S. did ban importing slaves in 1808, but it did not enforce that law and did not outlaw owning people altogether until 1865, after Britain, Denmark, France and Spain had done so.)

The Washington character says in the video that he devoted his life to teaching people “the importance of independence and making themselves as valuable as possible.” And when one child says she’s sorry that he and other Black Americans faced segregation and discrimination, Washington thanks her for her sympathy but assures the child, who is white, that she’s done nothing wrong.

Echoing a conservative talking point, the cartoon Washington says, “Future generations are never responsible for the sins of the past.”

Jermaine Thibodeaux, a historian at the University of Oklahoma, said he is familiar with the PragerU videos and considers them an ideological tool of a “reeducation project nationwide” that can be misleading.

“I don’t think that’s something Washington necessarily uttered,” he said of the quote about future generations.

The value Washington placed on independence, Thibodeaux added, was “predicated on the notions of self-sufficiency post-slavery, when there was little help coming from the government.”

A spokesperson for PragerU declined to comment for this story.

Pressure to keep squeezing social justice and LGBTQ+ issues out of classrooms has been intensifying since 2021, when Republican state lawmakers began pushing “dirty book” legislation that would censor school libraries. One bill, which didn’t pass, called for firing school employees and fining offenders $10,000 each time they “promoted positions in opposition to closely held religious beliefs of the student.” That was the backdrop when the state accused Summer Boismier of “moral turpitude” and then revoked her teaching license last year.

The English department at Norman High School near Oklahoma City told Boismier and her colleagues they needed to pull titles that might be considered racially divisive or contain themes about sex and gender. Or they could turn books around on the shelves so students couldn’t see the titles.

“I remember just sitting in my seat shaking. I had colleagues in the room who were in tears,” Boismier said. Given the choice to purge books or hide their covers, Boismier did neither. She wrapped her classroom’s bookshelf in red butcher paper and wrote “books the state doesn’t want you to read” on it in black marker. She added a QR code linking to the Brooklyn Public Library, where students could get a library card and virtual access to books considered inappropriate in Oklahoma, then posted a photo of it all on social media.

Boismier, who resigned in protest of the 2021 law, challenged the license revocation in court, and the case is ongoing. She said she does not regret taking a stand against a law she views as unjust. The state has argued the revocation is valid.

“I am living every teacher in Oklahoma’s worst nightmare right now,” she said. “I am unemployable.”

In the Battiest district, where Turner is superintendent, an elementary reading teacher told ProPublica that just to be safe, she removed books about diversity and including others who are different. She said that was uncomfortable; half of her students are Native American, and so is she.

Adopted this year, the state’s new social studies standards provide even more specifics about what should be taught. They include the expectation that students know “stories from Christianity that influenced the American Founders and culture, including the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth (e.g., the ‘Golden Rule,’ the Sermon on the Mount),” to second graders. A state court last month issued a temporary stay on requiring schools to follow the standards while a lawsuit against them plays out.

In addition, the new standards accept Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. They dictate that ninth graders learn about “discrepancies” in election results including “the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters” and other unsupported conservative talking points. The Trump campaign and supporters filed at least 60 lawsuits covering these points; nearly all were dismissed as meritless or were decided against Trump. The election skepticism standard has left the superintendent of a roughly 2,000-student district north of Tulsa confused. He said he and other superintendents are unsure how they would navigate those but are hopeful that “standards rooted in fact prevail.”

“There comes a point where curriculum cannot be opinion,” said the superintendent, who didn’t want to be named because he feared retaliation. “I’m not trying to get involved in conspiracy theories.”

Fear and Resistance

The push by state leaders to embed more Christian values in schools isn’t what keeps many superintendents in the rural parts of the state up at night. They say the Bible has never left their classrooms.

“I am smack-dab right in the middle of the Bible Belt,” said the leader of a tiny district on the western side of the state. “We are small, but we have seven churches. You’re talking ‘Footloose’ here.”

While she doesn’t disagree with everything the Legislature and Walters have done, she said she feels like some of their actions undermine public schools and could “shut down rural Oklahoma.”

She and other leaders of public school districts worry that the state’s expanded school choice program, which allows families to get tax credits if they attend private and religious schools, will draw away students from their districts and, ultimately, erode their funding. Congress passed the first federal private school tax credit in July.

It’s just the second year of the statewide tax credit program approved by the Legislature that allows students to use public funds to attend private and religious schools. The credits cost the state nearly $250 million in tax revenue this school year and subsidizes almost 40,000 students. That money, superintendents say, is desperately needed in their districts.

The state also has encouraged the growth of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run and subject to fewer regulations. Last year, the state’s third-largest district, behind the Oklahoma City and Tulsa districts, wasn’t a traditional one. It was EPIC, a statewide online charter school. Walters and Gov. Kevin Stitt supported St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School in its efforts to become the country’s first religious charter school. The Supreme Court blocked it from opening.

Even communities with few private schools feel threatened by the state’s push toward privatization. At Nashoba Public School, in a rural part of southeast Oklahoma where there’s little else but timber and twisting roads, the roughly 50 kids who make up the elementary and middle grades are taught in split-grade classrooms. Like hundreds of other Oklahoma districts, more than three-quarters of which are rural, it’s not just a school, it’s the school; there are no private schools in Pushmataha County.

When students enroll in charter schools, they often take funding with them while districts have to maintain operations as before.

“You starve your public schools to feed your private schools and charter schools,” said Nashoba Superintendent Charles Caughern Jr. “Our foundation was set up for a free and appropriate education for all kids. All kids!”

Caughern fears students with disabilities will suffer as public schools are weakened. Private schools don’t have to admit students with disabilities, and many won’t, he said.

Erika Wright, a parent who leads the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, which advocates for public schools, said the state’s deep-red politics might lead outsiders to think Oklahomans support state leaders pushing education far to the right. But that’s not the case, Wright said.

“They don’t understand what’s happening,” Wright said. “They just assume that public schools are always going to be there because they’ve always been there in their lifetime. I think the average Oklahoman does not understand the gravity and complexity of what is taking place.”

That’s not to say there isn’t resistance. A group of about 15 parents and public school advocates that Walters derided as the “woke peanut gallery” goes to State Board of Education meetings — a visual reminder that people care about education policy and public schools. A suburban Oklahoma City district is devising plans to deliver all of the Bible lessons contained in the new social studies standards on the same day, giving parents an easy way to have their children opt out. Court challenges to some of the state’s right-wing policies are pending.

Some are hopeful that Oklahoma will recalibrate the more extreme policies that marked Walters’ tenure. The State Board of Education last week decided not to revoke the licenses of two teachers who Walters wanted punished for their social media posts about Trump. The new superintendent said he would drop Walters’ plan to distribute Bibles to every classroom.

But many of the significant changes in classrooms came out of the Legislature, which has continued this year to propose bills to rid schools of “inappropriate materials” and proclaim that, in Oklahoma, “Christ is King.” A lot of damage already has been done to public schools, said Turner, the Battiest superintendent.

He was only half-joking when he said some parents have been “brainwashed” by right-wing TV news and Oklahoma leaders’ talk of liberal indoctrination to think the district is teaching kids to be gay or converting Christian kids into atheists.

A couple of years ago, one mom stopped him in the parking lot at school to say she was withdrawing her child from the district because its teaching didn’t align with her values. The superintendent was floored.

“That’s the power of the rhetoric,” Turner said.

He said he used to sit a couple of pews behind that mom in church every Sunday.

Two parents and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a national disability rights group, jointly filed the lawsuit. It alleges that decimating the department’s Office for Civil Rights will leave the agency unable to handle the public’s complaints of discrimination at school. That, they said, would violate the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The complaint comes three days after the Education Department notified about 1,300 employees — including the entire staff in seven of the 12 regional civil rights offices — that they are being fired, and the day after a group of 21 Democratic attorneys general sued McMahon and the president. That lawsuit alleges the Trump administration does not have the authority to circumvent Congress to effectively shutter the department.

The complaint filed on Friday argues that the “OCR has abdicated its responsibility to enforce civil rights protections” and that the administration has made a “decision to sabotage” the Education Department’s civil rights functions. That, the lawsuit alleges, overrides Congress’ authority. It names the Education Department, McMahon and the acting head of OCR, Craig Trainor.

“Through a series of press releases, policy statements, and executive orders, the administration has made clear its contempt for the civil rights of marginalized students,” the lawsuit says.

The parents’ lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It asks the court to declare the “decimation” of the OCR unlawful and seeks an injunction to compel the office to “process OCR complaints promptly and equitably.”

A Department of Education spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But the department has said it would still meet its legal obligations.

The lawsuit brought by the attorneys general was filed in federal court in Massachusetts. It alleges the firings are “so severe and extreme that it incapacitates components of the Department responsible for performing functions mandated by statute.” It cites the closing of the seven regional OCR outposts as an example.

Each year, the OCR investigates thousands of allegations of discrimination in schools based on disability, race and gender and is one of the federal government’s largest civil rights units. At last count there were about 550 OCR employees; at least 243 union-represented employees were laid off Tuesday.

The administration plans to close OCR locations in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Offices will remain in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit brought by the parents and advocacy group reveals concerns by students and families who have pending complaints that, under President Donald Trump, are not being investigated. There also are concerns that new complaints won’t get investigated if they don’t fall under one of the president’s priorities: curbing antisemitism, ending participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports and combating alleged discrimination against white students.

After Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, the administration implemented a monthlong freeze on the agency’s civil rights work. Although OCR investigators were prohibited from working on their assigned discrimination cases, the Trump administration launched a new “End DEI Portal” meant only to collect complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion in schools. It has said it is trying to shrink the size of government, including the Education Department, which Trump has called a “big con job.”

Trump’s actions so far have led many to wonder “if there is a real and meaningful complaint investigation process existing at the moment,” said Johnathan Smith, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, which represents the plaintiffs. Smith is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

“They are putting the thumb on the scale of who the winners and losers are before they do the investigation, and that is deeply problematic from a law enforcement perspective,” Smith said.

The lawsuit is perhaps the most substantive legal effort to require the Education Department to enforce civil rights since 1970, when the NAACP sued the agency for allowing segregation to continue. That lawsuit resulted in repeated overhauling of the OCR and 20 years of judicial oversight, with the goal of ensuring that the division fairly investigated and enforced discrimination claims.

Students and families turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their schools or colleges. Both individuals named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit are parents of students whose civil rights complaints were being investigated — until Trump took office.

One of the plaintiffs, Alabama parent Nikki S. Carter, has three students and is an advocate for students with disabilities in her community. Carter is Black. According to the lawsuit, Carter filed a complaint with OCR in 2022 alleging discrimination on the basis of race after her children’s school district, the Demopolis City Schools, twice banned Carter from school district property.

When reached by ProPublica, the district superintendent said he’s not aware of the lawsuit or the civil rights complaint and could not comment; he is new to the district.

The district has said it barred Carter after a confrontation with a white staff member. But Carter has said that a white parent who had a similar confrontation wasn’t banned, leading her to believe that the district punished her because of her advocacy. She said it prevented her from attending parent-teacher conferences and other school events.

The other parent, identified by the initials A.W., filed a complaint with OCR alleging their child’s school failed to respond properly to sexual assault and harassment by a classmate.

Investigations of both families’ discrimination complaints have stopped under the new OCR leadership, according to the lawsuit.

At the same time, there’s been a dramatic drop in the number of new cases opened by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — and the few that attorneys have been directed to investigate reflect some of Trump’s priorities: getting rid of gender-neutral bathrooms, banning transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports and alleged antisemitism or discrimination against white students.

The OCR has opened about 20 new investigations since Trump’s inauguration, sources inside the department told ProPublica, a low number compared with similar periods in previous years. During the first three weeks of the Biden administration, for instance, the office opened about 110 new investigations into discrimination based on race, gender, national origin or disability, the office’s historic priorities. More than 250 new cases were opened in the same time period last year.

Historically, the bulk of investigations in the office have been launched after students or their families file complaints. Since Trump took office, the focus has shifted to “directed investigations,” meaning that the Trump administration has ordered those inquiries.

“We have not been able to open any (investigations) that come from the public,” said one longtime OCR attorney who asked not to be named for fear of losing their job.

Several employees told ProPublica that they have been told not to communicate with the students, families and schools involved in cases launched in previous administrations and to cancel scheduled meetings and mediations. “We’ve been essentially muzzled,” the attorney said.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Even though new case openings typically slow during a presidential transition as new political appointees gain their footing and set priorities, it is not typical for it to all but stop. “Under the first Trump administration, of course things shifted and there were changes, but we never had this gag order on us,” said another OCR attorney who also asked not to be named.

The shift at the OCR comes as Trump has called the Education Department a “con job” and is expected to issue an executive order that the department be dismantled. In her confirmation hearing on Thursday, Trump’s nominee to be education secretary, Linda McMahon, said she hadn’t decided whether to cut funding to the OCR, as Republicans have called for.

This week, the Trump administration terminated more than $900 million in contracts that mostly focused on education research and data on learning and the country’s schools. The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, which said it also ended dozens of training grants for educators that it deemed wasteful.

Since 1979, the department’s civil rights arm has worked to enforce the nation’s antidiscrimination laws in schools. It operates under a congressional mandate to uphold the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as the federal laws that prohibit discriminating against students because of gender or disability.

About 12,000 complaints were under investigation when Trump took office. The largest share of pending complaints — about 6,000 — are related to students with disabilities who feel they’ve been mistreated or unfairly denied help at school, according to a ProPublica analysis of department data.

Investigators were pursuing about 3,200 active complaints of racial discrimination, including unfair discipline and racial harassment. An additional roughly 1,000 complaints were specific to sexual harassment or sexual violence, the analysis found. The remainder concern a range of discrimination claims.

Students and families often turn to the OCR after they feel their concerns have not been addressed by their school districts. The process is free, which means even if families can’t afford a lawyer to pursue a lawsuit, they may still get relief — access to disabilities services or increased safety at school, for example.

When the OCR finds evidence of discrimination, it can force a school district or college to change its policies or provide services to a student, and it sometimes monitors the institutions to make sure they comply.

Last fall, for example, the OCR concluded that a rural Pennsylvania school district had failed to protect Black students from racist taunts and harassment by a group of white students. White students in the Norwin School District had circulated a photo of themselves labeled “Kool Kids Klub,” wore Confederate flag clothing, told a Black student to “go pick cotton” and used racial epithets, investigators found. District officials initially said they saw no problem with some of the white students’ behavior and did not believe the students had created a racially hostile environment.

But the OCR’s findings and corrective action required the district to study several years of racial harassment complaints and undergo training on how to better respond to racial conflict in the district.

The department’s power to hold schools accountable when they fail to protect students and provide relief in real time — while a student is still in school — makes its work urgent, civil rights attorneys and department staff said.

About 600 of the Education Department’s roughly 4,000 employees work in the OCR, either at the Washington headquarters or one of 12 regional offices. At least 74 department employees, some of whom had taken diversity training, have been placed on administrative leave, according to Sheria Smith, an OCR attorney and president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, a union that represents nonmanagement Education Department employees.

Smith said 15 of those workers on leave are from the OCR. Fifty newer Education Department employees were fired Wednesday, she said, including three from the OCR.

“The one thing that is clear right now is we have a complete disruption of the services we provide and are hearing from our stakeholders,” Smith said, citing as an example a Kentucky family reaching out to silenced OCR workers to plead for answers about the complaint they’d made about how their elementary school handled their child’s sexual assault.

“It is the members of the public that are suffering with these disruptions,” she said.

Another department employee who asked not to be identified, fearing they could lose their job, said a number of the students’ complaints are urgent.

“Many of these students are in crisis,” the employee said. “They are counting on some kind of intervention to get that student back in school and graduate or get accommodations.”

There are students who need help now, the employee said. “And now the federal government is literally doing nothing.”

The department’s new leadership has said publicly it plans to broaden the types of discrimination the department will investigate. Among the cases it is investigating is whether one all-gender restroom in a Denver high school discriminates against girls. The acting head of the OCR even took the unusual step of announcing the investigation in a press release, something previous administrations typically did not do.

“Let me be clear: it is a new day in America, and under President Trump, OCR will not tolerate discrimination of any kind,” acting OCR head Craig Trainor said in the press release announcing that he had directed civil rights staff to investigate a Denver Public Schools bathroom because it “appears to directly violate the civil rights of the District’s female students.”

Denver schools spokesperson Scott Pribble called the investigation “unprecedented.” He added, “This is not the first all-gender bathroom we have in a school, but it’s the first time an investigation has been opened by OCR.” There are other girls’ restrooms in the school; only one was converted to an all-gender restroom after students lobbied school administrators to do so.

Trainor again took a tough approach on Wednesday when he announced a new investigation into high school athletics groups in Minnesota and California, both of which have said they would not shut transgender women out of women’s sports. The administration had already opened three similar investigations against other institutions for alleged violations of Title IX, the federal law that prevents gender-based discrimination in education programs, in response to the executive order Trump had signed to ban transgender women and girls from participating in women’s sports.

The states “are free to engage in all the meaningless virtue-signaling that they want, but at the end of the day they must abide by federal law,” Trainor said.

The OCR also decided that it would investigate a complaint filed in August by the Equal Protection Project, a conservative nonprofit, that alleges discrimination against white students. The Biden administration had not acted on the complaint, but new department leaders decided within days that it would proceed with an investigation. The complaint alleges that the Ithaca City School District in New York excluded white students by hosting an event called the Students of Color Summit.

Cornell University professor William Jacobson, who founded the Equal Protection Project, said his organization has filed about 60 complaints over the years with the OCR, some of which remain under investigation. Asked whether he thought the change in administration helped fast-track the Ithaca complaint, he said, “I don’t see how it could have hurt.”

“We want evenhanded enforcement, and we hope the department will be more aggressive than it has in the past,” Jacobson said. “If there are programs that exclude Black students, we want the department to go after that, but I am not aware of such programs.”

Ithaca school officials declined to comment.

Catherine Lhamon, who oversaw the OCR under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, questioned the current administration’s approach of issuing press releases to announce investigations. One announcement included a quote from a former collegiate athlete who has railed against transgender women in sports.

“It’s hugely political and suggests a conclusion before the OCR has even conducted an investigation,” Lhamon said. The agency, she said, is supposed to be a neutral fact-finder.

The agency appears to have ended its long-standing practice of making public a list of institutions that are being investigated and what type of discrimination is alleged. That was last updated Jan. 14, the week before Trump’s inauguration.

The broad language in the email did not specify which programs or policies would be impacted, or how many schools or students might be affected. But the order appears designed to target programs that in recent years supported transgender students — school-based mental health services and support for homeless students, for example.

“These corrective measures will include thorough review and subsequent termination of Departmental programs, contracts, policies, outward-facing media, regulations, and internal practices,” according to the email sent to department employees and obtained by ProPublica.

A spokesperson for the Education Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The email, which was unsigned and sent from “ED Internal Communications,” also takes aim at employee programs at the Education Department. Employees across the federal government already have been instructed to remove preferred pronouns from their email signatures.

“Employee resource groups that promote gender ideology and do not affirm the reality of biological sex cannot meet on government property or take place during official work hours,” the email said.

It’s not clear what resource groups the email is referencing or whether they exist.

The Trump administration has curbed transgender rights in other federal agencies; it has barred transgender people from serving in the military, reinstating a policy from Trump’s first term, and in federal prisons it has tried to move transgender women to male facilities, an effort a judge has blocked.

The sweeping directive outlined in Friday’s Education Department email follows two recent executive orders targeting “gender ideology.” The first, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” ordered federal agencies to scrub references to transgender people from documents, rules and policies. The department appears to have complied with the order by, for example, removing resources like tips for schools on how to support homeless LGBTQ+ youth.

Another executive order issued this week, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” barred transgender athletes from participating in women’s sports at school. The Education Department on Thursday announced investigations into two universities and an athletic association related to transgender athletes and the institutions’ alleged violations of Title IX, a federal law that is part of the Civil Rights Act and prohibits sex-based discrimination in education. The same day, the NCAA reacted by barring athletes who were identified as male at birth from playing women’s sports.

The email sent to employees Friday afternoon stated: “The deliberate subjugation of women and girls by means of gender ideology — whether in intimate spaces, weaponized language, or American classrooms — negated the civil rights of biological females and fostered distrust of our federal institutions.”

Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee for secretary of education, is still awaiting confirmation.

She is co-founder with her husband of World Wrestling Entertainment and chair of the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit that has campaigned against transgender rights in schools.

Even without McMahon, like-minded colleagues already are working in the department, including several staff members from her conservative think tank. The bio of newly appointed Deputy General Counsel Candice Jackson, for instance, touts her experience “challenging the harmful effects of the concept of ‘gender identity’ in laws and policies in schools.”

Schools have experienced whiplash in recent years as presidents imposed — and then removed — protections for transgender youth.

Under President Barack Obama in 2016, the department issued guidance to schools that the federal Title IX law protects the right of transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms at school that match their gender identities.

Schools “must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity,” the letter said.

Trump rescinded that guidance after he came into office in 2017, though the letter remained on the Education Department’s website. The Biden administration took the position in 2021 that transgender students deserved protection from discrimination under Title IX and publicized resources for schools and the LGBTQ+ students they serve.

Now that Trump is back in office again, many of those resource documents appear to have been wiped off the department’s website.

“President Trump is being the bully-in-chief. This administration wants to outlaw kindness and common decency in schools and make it illegal for teachers to call their students by the name they want to be called,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, the executive director of Advocates for Trans Equality, in a statement about the administration’s “Defending Women” executive order.

Trump’s vision in his second administration includes dismantling the Education Department altogether. It’s unclear if there’s a legal pathway to do so, but already the administration has placed more than 50 department employees on administrative leave who appear to be associated with diversity, equity or inclusion efforts.

Concerns have mounted at the Education Department all week. Members of Elon Musk’s team reportedly have accessed sensitive department data, and some members of Congress went to department headquarters to question the team but were denied access. Responding to the social media posts of one representative who was blocked from the building, Musk posted on X: “No such department exists in the federal government.”

The legislation for the first time also would require districts to track police activity at schools and disclose it to the state — data collection made more pressing as federal authorities have signaled they will deemphasize their role in civil rights enforcement.

A 2022 ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation, “The Price Kids Pay,” found that even though Illinois law bans school officials from fining students directly, districts skirt the law by calling on police to issue citations for violating local ordinances. It also found that Black students were twice as likely to be ticketed at school than their white peers.

Following the news investigation, the governor, state superintendent and lawmakers urged schools to stop the practice, but legislative efforts repeatedly stalled. The bill introduced Monday in the Illinois House takes a new approach to end police ticketing at schools by making clear that police can arrest students for crimes or violence but that they cannot ticket students for violating local ordinances prohibiting a range of infractions, including vaping, disorderly conduct, truancy and other behavior.

That distinction was not clear in previous versions of the legislation, which led to concern that schools would not be able to involve police in serious matters — and was a key reason legislation on ticketing floundered. The tickets, which are issued for civil violations of local laws, often are adjudicated in administrative hearings where students typically don’t get legal representation.

Rep. La Shawn Ford, a Democrat from Chicago and the bill’s chief sponsor, said ticketing students for vaping is an example of how current policies are failing. He said it’s important that school districts disclose what types of police interactions are taking place to monitor for civil rights violations and other concerns.

“We definitely need to make sure to enshrine what we believe into law. We can’t let Trump policies dictate our morals,” Ford said. “Our schools should be a place where we protect students from the school-to-prison pipeline, period.”

Several advocacy groups, which have been drafting the legislation along with the Illinois State Board of Education, say there is new energy behind the stronger, more precise version of legislation that they unsuccessfully pushed in the 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions.

The earlier bills never got a full vote in either chamber. The Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police was among those objecting to the bills because of fears over limiting police responses to criminal activity.

Patrick Kreis, a vice president for the chiefs association, said the group is in favor of police staying out of student disciplinary matters like truancy and vaping. He has not yet seen the new bills but said the group will work with lawmakers and advocates “to see if there is a way to make this work where we can still do this job and appreciate the underlying concern being raised.”

Aimee Galvin with Stand for Children, an Illinois nonprofit that pushes for education equity and racial justice, said ensuring districts track police involvement is a way of “Trump proofing” students’ civil rights.

“We would like to see this data in Illinois,” Galvin said. “If policy were to change at the [U.S. Department of Education], we would lose all data about how schools are interacting with law enforcement, and that is really concerning to us.”

The civil rights division of the U.S. Education Department for years has collected broad information about how often police are involved with students and how often students are arrested. President Donald Trump has said he wants to dismantle the department, and it’s not clear what impact that would have on the civil rights data collection. And the federal government has never monitored student ticketing.

A second bill that also aims to curb police activity in schools is expected to be filed in the Illinois Senate on Tuesday. Although it also would aim to end ticketing, it likely will take a different approach than the House version by prohibiting school administrators from calling on police to write tickets as a disciplinary consequence. It also would bar schools from referring truant students or their parents to authorities to be issued a fine.

Ford and Senate sponsor Karina Villa, a Democrat from West Chicago, said they expect to draw from debate about both bills to earn broad support and refine the final version of the legislation.

There have been some piecemeal changes and efforts at reform following the “Price Kids Pay” investigation, including a state attorney general investigation that confirmed that school administrators were exploiting a loophole in state law by asking police to ticket students. That investigation found a large suburban Chicago district broke the law when it directed police to fine students and that the practice disproportionately affected Black and Latino students. The state’s top legal authority declared the practice illegal and said it should stop.

But the House and Senate sponsors of the new legislation said that without it, the practice will continue. Records show that school-based police have ticketed students at high schools in Kankakee County in the eastern part of the state, East Peoria in Central Illinois and Monmouth near the western border with Iowa over the past year for a range of infractions like possessing tobacco, fighting or drinking alcohol.

In one town, students received fines as high as $450 this fall for possession of cannabis; in another, truancy fines for dozens of students and their families are being sent to collections.

“They should not be fining families and they should not be directing officers to issue tickets to students,” Villa said of schools where students receive tickets. “Our bill is intended to stop the practice.”

Other state leaders also have said they want to end the practice of ticketing students at school, including Gov. J.B. Pritzker and the state schools superintendent, Tony Sanders. The Illinois State Board of Education made preventing students from being ticketed at school as discipline one of this session’s legislative priorities in December.

Board spokesperson Jackie Matthews said changing the law is necessary “particularly because of the disproportionate impact this practice has on students of color.”

“We are continuing to work with stakeholders and lawmakers to arrive at a solution that protects students,” she said.