Federal agencies threaten to sue Kansas school district in 14 days over rules for trans students

Sofi Zeman, The Kansas City Star on Jul 22, 2026

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Two federal agencies are again threatening to sue Kansas City, Kansas, Public Schools over its policies involving students’ gender identities.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday issued a joint statement calling on KCKPS to revoke any internal guidelines that allow staff or administrators to use discretion when deciding whether to share a student’s gender identity with that child’s parents or guardians.

The departments are threatening to file a lawsuit against the school district and to freeze its federal funding if KCKPS does not revoke any of those guidelines, evaluate their policies to make sure all fit Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) standards and issue a directive to all staff saying they have to share all information about students with their guardians.

Their Tuesday letter also states that KCKPS must provide written confirmation that the district has made all these changes, and that it must provide proof of any written internal guideline involving students who are transgender, dating back to 2017.

The district has 14 days to comply with those requests if it doesn’t want to deal with a lawsuit, according to the letter.

“Parents have a right to know what’s happening in their children’s schools,” wrote Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the DOJ, on X. “Some districts hide behind secret ‘guidelines’ that keep parents unaware of critical issues.”

The threats from the federal government come weeks after someone leaked a video of district officials saying that although KCKPS doesn’t have written policies surrounding how it discloses when a child voices that they want to be addressed by different pronouns, that it does have some internal guidelines that are not public information.

“FERPA does NOT allow this. Every school district has a choice: follow the law, or we’ll see you in court!” Dhillon wrote in the X post.

The letter also follows a recent news release, published in late June, that similarly threatened a lawsuit and revoking of federal funds if it didn’t comply with the education department’s April determination that the district — as well as two in Johnson County and one in Topeka — violated FERPA by allegedly not notifying all parents when a student wants to use new pronouns.

KCKPS, and some district parents, have said that the district is not violating any federal laws involving parents’ rights to information about their children.