New York City sued the U.S. Education Department on Wednesday, saying that “chaos and uncertainty” followed the elimination of more than $35 million in federal grants for magnet schools after the city refused to overhaul policies regarding transgender and nonbinary students.
The lawsuit comes four weeks after the Trump administration asserted that New York City’s gender guidelines — including rules allowing students to use bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity — violated civil rights law and demanded that the policies be revised.
The administration sent similar warnings to two other large school districts — Chicago and Fairfax, Va. — over their gender and diversity, equity and inclusion policies, and pulled grant funding from all three last month after they refused to change course.
In New York, the nation’s largest school system, a relatively small number of schools were affected by the grants being withheld. But the administration’s actions alarmed city officials and illustrated the funding battles that could escalate under the next mayoral administration.
New York City argued in the lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan federal court, that the removal of funding was improper and flouted “procedures required by law.” It named several top officials in the Trump administration as defendants, including Linda McMahon, the education secretary.
The city’s corporation counsel, Muriel Goode-Trufant, wrote that the Education Department’s move imperiled the future of 19 schools — along with the plans of roughly 7,700 students who attend them.
Those pupils “should be enjoying the excitement and anticipation that only a new school year brings,” but the government instead “turned their lives upside down,” she wrote.
“The department’s unprecedented actions,” the lawsuit says, “represent a blatant attempt to avoid the exacting process required by law before the lives of schoolchildren, parents, teachers and administrators can be completely upended by the withdrawal of financial support to their schools.”
A spokeswoman for the federal Education Department said on Thursday that the lawsuit has no merit. The department, she said, could not certify that the New York schools were complying with civil rights laws in the face of the city’s “continued determination to violate the rights of female students under Title IX,” which prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funding.
The funding is distributed to districts through the Magnet Schools Assistance Program, which was developed decades ago to promote desegregation by providing money to establish magnet schools with diverse student populations.
In New York City, the lawsuit said, the program provided crucial funding for schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens to offer curriculum in areas such as technology, engineering, performing arts, journalism and civic activism.
Mayor Eric Adams last month criticized the school system’s gender policies in news conferences and media interviews, and said that he would push the city to change its bathroom policy. But his schools chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, said in a statement on Thursday that the school system was committed to “fighting back” against the federal attack.
The lawsuit noted that the city’s gender rules — such as allowing students to participate in physical education and athletics programs based on their gender identity — have been in place since 2019, with previous versions dating to 2014, and that the Education Department previously found the city “to be operating entirely consistent” with the law.
“The abrupt about-face,” the suit said, “puts politics before public schools.”
Seamus Hughes contributed research.
Troy Closson is a Times education reporter focusing on K-12 schools.
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