Beyond Bathrooms: School District Policies and Practices Regarding Gender-Expansive Students and Employees

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

Introduction and Research Aims
American schools are on the frontline of the controversy over policies related to gender-expansive populations, people whose gender expression and felt identities do not match prescribed social norms for femininity or masculinity; yet, there is little research examining what educational policies exist for gender-expansive students and employees and in what school districts these policies are most likely to occur. This lack of research is problematic in light of the growing evidence indicating there are negative health, academic, and social impact of poor school climates for gender-expansive people (McQuillan, 2018; Institute of Medicine, 2011). One solution to these social and health risks is to implement protective policies and affirming practices, such as specific protections from discrimination and allowing transgender students to use the bathroom of their affirmed identity. This mixed-methods study attempts to address the gap in the research literature by examining three main research questions: 1) What policies do school districts have that may disproportionately influence gender-expansive students and district employees? 2) How many districts have inclusive policies or procedures and how extensive are the protections? And 3) What districts are more likely to have inclusive policies or procedures?

Methods
To address these questions, I used stratified random sampling based on enrollment to obtain a sample size of 112 districts, about a quarter of the districts in Illinois with high school enrollment and representing 45% of the student population. For each district, I collected up to 13 document sources from district websites, office personnel, and, in a small number of cases, Freedom of Information Act requests. Using grounded theory, I initially open-coded these documents for important themes in order to develop a coding scheme for a content analysis of the remaining documents (Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 2008). This approach allowed me to detect both official, school-board approved policies for protecting gender-expansive youth, as well as other means (such as administrator-approved procedures and guidelines) by which districts and schools may be addressing the needs of gender-expansive students or employees. It also provided estimates of the proportion of students and districts under these inclusive policies and procedures. I assess what kinds of districts were more likely to adopt inclusive policies and procedures, I combined data collected from district documents with information about district and community characteristics. I was then able to assess if districts with specific features were more likely to have protective and affirming policies in place by means of logistic and ordinary least squares (OLS) multivariate regression analysis.

Author

• Mollie McQuillan, Northwestern University