Hillsborough Same-Gender Schools Under Fire

The Hillsborough County school district is firing back over a May complaint from the American Civil Liberties Union that suggests the district’s use of same-gender schools and classrooms is discriminatory.

Back in May, the civil rights organization asked the state and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to investigate the district’s same-gender programs, saying they’re “based on junk science about differences between boys’ and girls’ brains,” according to an ACLU press release.

“The Hillsborough School District has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds to implement a hidden curriculum promoting the theory that boys and girls are so fundamentally different that they need to be taught using radically different teaching methods,” said Galen Sherwin, Senior Staff Attorney of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, in the release. “The truth is that every student learns differently, and our public schools should not be in the business of making crude judgments about children’s educational needs based solely on whether they are a boy or a girl.”

The district has now answered that complaint and is raising the argument that the ACLU had no right to make it in the first place.

“That investigation should not, and cannot, be conducted in circumstances in which a party having no standing except its opposition to all single-sex education seeks to renew a debate that has been settled,” The Tampa Tribune quoted school district attorney Tom Gonzalez as saying.

About 2,000 of the district’s 200,000 students are taught in voluntary same-gender programs, the paper reported. The district has several same-sex classrooms and an academy for boys and one for girls.

It contends students are doing rather well. Both academies earned an A-rating from the Florida Department of Education during the 2013-14 school year.

What do you think about the ACLU’s complaint? Do same-gender educational programs discriminate? Tell us what you think by commenting below!