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Education officials in Maine declared this week that they will not sign a compliance agreement with the Trump administration, continuing the state’s standoff with President Trump over his political fixation on transgender girls in school sports.
On March 17, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) stated in a press release that both the Maine Principals’ Association and Maine School Administrative District No. 51 (MSAD 51) had violated Title IX civil rights law by allowing trans girls to compete with cisgender girls in the same school sports leagues. The release said both entities would be offered “an opportunity to voluntarily commit within 10 days to resolve the matter through a signed agreement or risk referral to the U.S. Department of Justice for appropriate action.”
But neither the Principals’ Association nor the MSAD #51 Board of Directors will sign that compliance agreement, representatives said this week.
In a statement to WMTW, the Principals’ Association said that their organization would continue to follow the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA), which prohibits education discrimination based on gender identity. “We are unable to sign any resolution agreement that would mandate we create a new policy that would violate the law and MHRA,” a spokesperson told WMTW. “As such, we have not signed and will not sign the resolution agreement sent by the Federal Department of Health and Human Services.”
The MSAD #51 Board of Directors likewise said they would not sign an HHS agreement due to the MHRA, in a letter sent to district families and obtained by WMTW. The district includes Greely High School, which Republican Maine state representative Laurel Libby had accused of allowing a trans teen to compete in a track competition last month. Libby’s Facebook post misgendered and potentially publicly identified the student; the Maine House of Representatives censured Libby for the post.
“We are writing today to inform our community that MSAD #51 will not be agreeing to the proposed VRA sent to our district,” the Board of Directors wrote, per WMTW. “As stated during our Board meeting on March 6th, MSAD #51 will continue to follow state law and the Maine Human Rights Act (MHRA). Compliance with the proposed VRA would be a violation of current Maine law.” The Board recently conferred with legal counsel during a March 21 meeting, according to the Board’s public agenda, but the details of that meeting were not disclosed.
Libby’s Facebook post targeting the Greely High School student sparked a major feud between President Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills in February. Mills, a Democrat, told Trump she would “see [him] in court” during a meeting of the National Governors’ Association at the White House, after Trump demanded she defer to his executive orders purporting to “end gender ideology” in federal policy. “We will follow the law,” Mills said at the time; executive orders are, notably, not laws. Multiple federal agencies immediately opened investigations into the state, with HHS’s investigation of the state Department of Education lasting just four calendar days. (HHS officials expanded their investigation to include the Maine Principals’ Association and MSAD #51 in early March.)
In a post on his majority-owned social media platform Truth Social last week, Trump claimed that he had received an “apology” from the state of Maine for Mills’ defiance, but it’s not clear what, if any, actual apology he was referencing, or who delivered it, as WGME noted this week. It was apparently not from Mills herself, as Trump also demanded a “full throated apology” from the governor in that post, along with “a statement that she will never make such an unlawful challenge to the Federal Government again.”
Mills ignored Trump’s demand for an apology in a statement obtained by WGME on Monday. “I read the Constitution. The Constitution says that the president, the chief executive, shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. It doesn’t allow him to make laws out of whole cloth by tweet or Instagram post by press release or executive order,” Mills said. “That’s just fundamental law, and I stand by the rule of law and separation of powers.”
Administration officials have taken on the role of enforcers of Trump’s enmity, retaliating against states, educational institutions, and private companies alike for real or perceived slights to the president and his agenda. The impact of those decisions has been far-reaching, threatening hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for defying his anti-trans executive orders and other agenda items. Acting head of the Social Security Administration Leland Dudek admitted in comments to the New York Times this week that after seeing Mills’ remarks to Trump, he briefly ended electronic death reporting across the state and canceled a contract that allowed parents to register newborn babies for a Social Security number at Maine hospitals. Dudek said he reversed those decisions a few hours later, and had made them out of anger because he did not think Mills was properly respectful to Trump.
“I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president,” Dudek told the Times. “I screwed up. I’ll admit I screwed up.”
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