Dear Secretary Cardona and Acting Assistant Secretary Goldberg,

Schools are failing student survivors of gender-based violence.

For decades, student survivors have made their voices heard and demanded their government and institutions protect their safety and access to education. But time and time again, institutions have ignored survivors' stories, swept their complaints under the rug, and forced them to face continued sexual harassment and violence because of their failure to prioritize survivors' safety.

Before 2017, the Department of Education (ED) and the White House were just beginning to seriously tackle the epidemic of sexual violence in education. After survivors shared their most painful and personal stories to demand that the Department take action, ED issued guidance reminding schools of their legal obligations to survivors and made clear that the government would hold schools accountable for violating student survivors’ rights. This gave us hope that schools would finally begin to prioritize the safety of their students — but we knew the fight was far from over.

Sadly, today, we are even farther from Title IX’s core commitment — to ensure students are able to learn free from violence.

When former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took office, she did everything in her power to roll back the rights of student survivors and make it easier for schools to ignore pervasive sexual violence. In doing so, Secretary DeVos furthered a culture of impunity that allowed administrators at all levels to effectively push survivors out of school and make campuses less safe.

DeVos’s Title IX rule prioritizes the rights of named harassers over the safety of students. Fewer student survivors are willing to report sexual assaults or harassment to their school to seek help. And when students do report, too often they face retaliation, discipline, and threats of defamation suits.

Survivors are suffering because under DeVos, ED pressured schools to turn their backs on survivors, but we’re not backing down. Today, student survivors are more likely to drop out of school (or be pushed out) because of sexual violence and their institutions’ failures to take their complaints seriously. But you have the power to do something about it.

As President Biden said, “[a]ny backstepping on Title IX is unacceptable.” That’s why we demand that the Department of Education take action immediately to support the rights of student survivors who are living with the real life consequences of DeVos’s Title IX rule — and their school’s apathy toward their safety and education — each and every day.

We demand the Department of Education:
1) Issue proposed changes to the Title IX rule by October 1, 2021. Survivors don’t have the luxury of waiting for the government to take their safety and rights seriously while they are denied the most basic protections because they weren’t assaulted or harassed at the right place, by the right person, or at the right time. Every day that passes only increases the numbers of survivors who will be forced to suffer because of DeVos’s Title IX rule and their school’s failure to protect their safety and educational access. Your Department of Education must act swiftly to ensure that no survivor is pushed out of school because of sexual violence and harassment.

2) Issue a Nonenforcement Directive on portions of DeVos’ Title IX rule, that currently:
a. Forbid schools from following state or local laws addressing sexual violence in education that provide greater protections for student survivors if they conflict with the DeVos Title IX rule (Sec. 106.6(h));
b. Force survivors into unfair and hostile investigations and hearings which only apply to victims of sexual violence, but no other form of campus misconduct (Sec. 106.45(b)); and
c. Require schools to dismiss Title IX complaints based on the location of the harassment, because the complainant has not suffered enough, or because the complainant was already pushed out by the sexual harassment/violence (Sec. 106.30(a) (definition of “formal complaint”) and 106.45(b)(3)).
3) Ensure that survivors can file complaints when their rights are violated by updating the Case Processing Manual. In 2018, DeVos’ Department of Education altered the case processing manual to limit the number of students who could seek help from the Office for Civil Rights, the agency charged with enforcing Title IX. Currently, students have only 180 days from the FIRST instance of alleged discrimination to file a complaint. Given that the new regulations allow for significant delays, this means that in order to get relief, many survivors would have to file a complaint with the OCR before their school has even concluded its investigation into their harassment complaint. Instead, consistent with other areas of nondiscrimination law, complainants should be allowed to file within 180 days from the most recent instance of discrimination instead of from the first instance.

Secretary Cardona and Acting Assistant Secretary Goldberg, you have the power to return Title IX to its intended purpose: to keep survivors in school and ensure that every student has the right to an education free from sexual violence and other forms of sex discrimination. Secretary DeVos’ rule drastically undermined this intended purpose. We refused to stay quiet when the Trump administration attempted to silence us, and we will continue to use our voices to demand your administration keep your commitment to prioritizing comprehensive, meaningful protections for survivors under Title IX. We, student survivors and their allies, are counting on your Department of Education to hear our demands, take action, and provide us with the protections we deserve.

Signed,