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Vermont’s largest school district, the Champlain Valley School District, has passed a set of policies that affirm transgender and nonbinary students’ identities. The policies require schools to let trans students access school facilities, play on sports teams, and use pronouns and names that match their gender identity without informing potentially unsupportive parents.
The policies, which closely follow the trans- and nonbinary-inclusive guidelines issued by the state Agency of Education in 2017, were developed using “feedback from principals, school counselors, and nurses, students, and parents, along with staff from the Vermont Department of Health and Outright Vermont,” the independent state publication Seven Days reported. The school board unanimously voted in favor of the policies, which underwent two rounds of legal review and will affect the district’s over 4,000 students.
The three-page policy set allows trans students to determine how much information about their identities they want to share with others, including their parents. It also allows students to decide which names and pronouns they want teachers to use — and to retroactively change this information on past student records — without requiring a court order or legal name change.
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