By Zara Lockshin

Charter schools are not allowed to kick students out just because they have bad grades. Unfortunately, at least one school did it anyway.

The Public Safety Academy of San Bernardino (PSASB) had a policy in its student handbook that allowed school administrators to remove students who did not maintain a 2.0 minimum GPA. As a result of this policy, PSASB kicked students out of the school for not performing well enough in their classes. Many of them were English learners, who spoke Spanish as a first language, who did not receive the English language instruction they needed before they were told they had to leave the school. Gabi (not her real name) is one of them.

Fortunately, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) intervened, and in late December the charter school agreed to change its policies to comply with state and federal law.

Under PSASB’s new rules, school administrators may no longer remove any child from school based on academic performance. They will now document the support they provide to English learner students and provide parents with translation services so they can fully participate in their child’s education.

While ACLU SoCal is heartened to see PSASB taking the right steps to address the problem, we remain concerned that other schools may have similar policies. The impact these policies have on students and their future academic careers is serious.

Take, for example, Gabi’s story.

Gabi, like 30 percent of students at PSASB, was an English learner. Gabi’s mother enrolled her at PSASB, hoping to provide her daughter a better education. Although Gabi had done well in elementary school, she had difficulty with her classes at PSASB. Gabi was too shy and embarrassed to ask for help, and her grade point average suffered.

But rather than offer Gabi the help she needed, the school simply kicked her out.

The week before Gabi was supposed to start her senior year, she was called into school to meet with the PSASB principal. Gabi’s mother, who speaks only Spanish, came with her, but the school did not make anyone available to translate for her. Gabi had to translate for her mother as school officials explained that Gabi was no longer welcome at PSASB.

Gabi was forced to rush to find a new school or face falling behind in her senior year. To make matters worse, because PSASB kicked her out so close to the beginning of the semester, many schools in her area had already started the academic year.

What happened to Gabi should never happen. The ACLU of California is proud to be sponsoring legislation that make it less likely to happen in the future. Although such practices are illegal under the state constitution and anti-discrimination laws, the charter school law does not explicitly state that charter schools cannot pick which students they wish to educate based on academic performance. SB 322, authored by Senator Mark Leno, would clarify that charter schools cannot adopt admission preferences or enrollment criteria that discriminate against students based on academic performance.

In the meantime, ACLU SoCal calls on other schools to follow PSASB’s example and revise their policies to eliminate any similar practices. Any charter school administrators who want to kick out the students who struggle academically need to reevaluate their priorities, because such policies do a disservice to our students, and have no place in our public schools. In the end, public schools, including charter schools, have an obligation to provide all children a quality education.

Zara Lockshin works in the communications department at the ACLU of Southern California.

The state should provide Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s medically necessary care for her gender dysphoria. PHOTO: AFP

 

There is no “transgender exception” to the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution—the provision that prohibits “cruel and unusual” punishment. That prohibition obligates prisons to treat inmates’ serious medical needs regardless of their sexual orientation. And that treatment includes gender-affirming surgery for the most severe forms of gender dysphoria.

In a friend of the court brief filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the ACLU and other civil rights organizations argued that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) should be required to provide Michelle-Lael Norsworthy’s medically necessary care for her gender dysphoria. The ACLU was joined by a dozen other organizations that work to protect the rights of prisoners and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) people.

The corrections department has provided Michelle with counseling and low doses of hormone therapy to treat her condition, but they are not working. That treatment is not alleviating the “excruciating” pain and suffering she experiences by not being able to conform her body to her gender identity–the gender she knows herself to be internally. The treatment also poses serious health risks due to a liver condition.

For these reasons, Michelle’s treating clinician determined that surgery for her gender dysphoria was “a clinical and medical necessity for her health and well-being.” A number of medical and mental health professionals with expertise in transgender health care agree. Her clinician’s recommendation was fully in line with professional standards that guide transgender health care. According to those standards, some people need medical treatment to align their gender identity and their physical characteristics.

While psychotherapy and/or hormone therapy is a sufficient treatment for many transgender people, there is overwhelming medical consensus that for some others with the most severe forms of gender dysphoria, gender-affirming surgery is the only available treatment that can address their pain and suffering.

CDCR refuses to provide Michelle with the surgery, the only treatment that would adequately address her serious medical needs. The department agrees that Michelle has a serious medical need, but it takes the position that it has fulfilled its constitutional obligation by giving her some treatment even though it has proved ineffective.

That argument is just flat-out wrong and plainly so if you pause for a second and take it out of the misunderstood world of transgender health care. Imagine, say, a prisoner has ovarian cancer. Now imagine that the prison provided her with radiation therapy but it did not eradicate the cancer and her doctor decided that a hysterectomy was now medically necessary to treat her cancer. No prison official would argue with a straight face – and certainly no court would accept – that the prison was free to ignore the doctor’s conclusion and refuse to provide the surgery.

That’s basically what CDCR is arguing in Michelle’s case, and we provided a number of reasons why that argument is wrong under very basic Eighth Amendment law. Our brief also argues that the district court was quite right to look at well-established professional standards of care when rejecting the prison’s position that gender-confirming surgery was merely elective and need not be provided.

In a nutshell, we argued there is a clear constitutional rule at play here: the Eighth Amendment requires the state to provide medically necessary treatment to prisoners with serious medical needs in a manner consistent with prudent professional standards and appropriate to the individual prisoner’s current medical condition. There is no “transgender” exception to that rule.

Melissa Goodman is director of the LGBTQ, Gender & Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California. Follow ACLU_SoCal.