Pennsylvania school boards up window openings that allowed views into its gender-neutral bathrooms

A Pennsylvania school district has reversed course and boarded up window openings it recently installed that allowed people in a middle school hallway to peer into two gender-neutral-designated bathrooms, the superintendent said Friday.

The two windows were installed in recent weeks following a vote in August of the South Western School District's conservative-majority school board, a move the board president said was designed to monitor and prevent misbehavior. Such openings weren’t installed in any of the school’s non-gender-neutral bathrooms.

The openings were covered by plywood on Thursday on the advice of lawyers from the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center, a conservative legal group the board consulted before ordering the windows installed, Superintendent Jay Burkhart said.

"I believe that we have to protect all of our students,” Burkhart said in a phone interview. “Students are entitled to privacy and I don’t want to violate that.”

The board “has been targeting transgender students and stripping away their rights for a while,” said Kristina Moon, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Education Law Center, which has asked affected students to reach out to it. She said the “multiple tiers and assignments” of bathrooms “overcomplicated a nonissue," stigmatizing students.

“Now they’ve cut actual holes for windows into the student bathrooms — but only the bathrooms they expect trans and nonbinary children to use. This is a horrifying violation of children’s privacy and cruel discrimination targeted against trans and nonbinary kids,” Moon said in an emailed statement.

The mother of an eighth-grader at Emory H. Markle Middle School in Hanover said Friday that she considered the decision to cover up the windows “a small victory.”

Jennifer Holahan, who drew attention to the bathroom window openings by posting a photo on social media, said she's “nervous to see” what happens at a meeting next week of the conservative-majority school board.

“This has been a continuing agenda that they've had,” Holahan said in a phone interview. “They've proved this more than once. I think this is the first time that the school board president has been shut down. And I just wonder what's to come from that.”

School board president Matthew A. Gelazela, elected as a Libertarian in 2021, told a reporter seeking comment Friday that he considered the call to be criminal harassment and abruptly hung up.

Earlier this week, Gelazela issued a statement defending the bathroom windows as a safety improvement — that “in making the area outside of stalls more viewable, we are better able to monitor for a multitude of prohibited activities such as any possible vaping, drug use, bullying or absenteeism,” the Evening Sun of Hanover reported.

Gelazela's statement also warned students that they should not consider the bathroom areas outside of the toilet stalls to be private.

Markle Middle School Principal Wes Winters directed questions about the bathroom windows to Gelazela. Board member Justin Lighty declined to discuss the matter, while several other board members and the board's lawyer didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

In an emailed statement, the ACLU of Pennsylvania described the school board's policy as discriminatory and one that makes children less safe. The South Western School District has about 4,400 students.

The York Dispatch reported this week that the board has been looking into LGBTQ+ students and bathrooms for more than a year, acting on concerns from unspecified people to establish five bathroom categories: male and female based on sex assigned at birth, male and female based on gender identity, and single-user facilities that are deemed gender neutral.

Gelazela said during an Aug. 14 board meeting that the windows were part of bathroom changes meant to bolster privacy, the Dispatch reported. The vote was 6-3 in favor of adding the windows, though the Evening Sun reported that work had already begun when the vote was taken.

Holahan said the window openings not only allowed people in the hallway to peer into the bathrooms, they also let noises from the bathrooms be heard. Burkhart, the superintendent, said the two gender neutral bathrooms have not been a particular problem for the type of misbehavior Gelazela cited. The renovations cost $8,700, Burkhart said.

At least 11 states have adopted laws barring transgender girls and women from using girls and women’s bathrooms at public schools, and in some cases other government facilities.

As for Pennsylvania, the Education Law Center wrote in a January analysis that federal appeals courts have ruled students have a right to use bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their gender identity. Moon, a senior lawyer for the center, said all children have the right to use an easily accessible bathroom convenient to their classes that affords them true privacy and does not discriminate based on sex and gender identity.