The mom of a transgender student at the center of a controversy involving Monarch High’s volleyball team could be fired this month from her job at the school.
The fate of Jessica Norton, an information management specialist at the Coconut Creek high school, is scheduled to be decided at a School Board meeting on June 18.
Norton was one of five Monarch officials removed from the school Nov. 27 amid an inquiry into whether there were any violations of the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act,” a 2021 law that bans transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.
But Norton is the only one facing potential discipline. A school district investigation cleared Principal James Cecil, Assistant Principal Kenneth May and Athletic Director Dione Hester after an investigation by the school district’s Special Investigative Unit.
Alex Burgess, a Monarch volleyball coach who is not a district employee, was also cleared and can return to coaching, district spokesman John Sullivan confirmed Monday.
Norton and her daughter sued the state and the school district in 2021 challenging the state law.
A federal judge upheld the ban Nov. 7 but allowed the family to refile, and the case is still pending. Then-Superintendent Peter Licata launched an investigation three weeks later after Board member Daniel Foganholi reported an anonymous tip he had received.
The district has not yet released its investigation into Norton. Sullivan would only cite violations to the state law and a state rule that bans anyone born male from playing girls’ sports as the reason for her recommended termination.
Norton hasn’t been told what her specific violation is, her lawyer, Jason Starr, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
“Ms. Norton is still in the dark specifically as to what conduct she engaged in or failed to engage in that constitutes an offense that is subject to employee discipline,” said Starr, who is director of litigation for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights group.
Starr said the only answer Norton has received is she has violated the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, but he argues an individual employee can’t violate the act. The law applies to public secondary or post-secondary schools and allows enforcement by private citizens who can bring lawsuits, he said.
Neither “Ms. Norton nor any individual person is a public secondary or post-secondary institution. If the Legislature had wanted to provide individual lability under this law, it certainly could have, but that’s not what they did,” Starr said.
Although Norton’s investigation has yet to be released, the district did release a transcript of an interview that two Special Investigative Unit detectives conducted with Norton.
The investigators suggested through their questioning that Norton allowed information about her child’s gender to exist in the school’s computer system, improperly enabling the student to play girls’ sports after the law was passed.
The investigation said that in the spring of 2017, four years before the state law took effect, Norton asked a staff person at Winston Park Elementary in Coconut Creek to change the gender of her child from male to female. At that time, Norton was a parent volunteer but not an employee. She told investigators this request happened after she attended an LGBTQ roundtable with then-Superintendent Robert Runcie.
“We discussed what could be changed in the system as far as demographics for transgendered children, and he said that we could change her sex in the system,” Norton told investigators.
Investigators were not able to find out who made this change, Sullivan told the Sun Sentinel.
“This change of a District student demographic record was made without any supporting documentation and in direct violation of the District’s policy,” Detective Thomas Honan wrote in several reports. “This false entry … directly caused the rest of the District’s student demographics and information databases to be distorted and display inaccurate information about [the student’s] sex at birth.”
Norton’s lawyers provided witness statements from people involved in the LGBTQ roundtable who confirmed the assertion that Runcie supported parents being easily able to change their child’s gender in the district system, Starr said. He noted that the district’s own LGBTQ support guide at the time made no mention of documentation being required.
Investigators also questioned why Norton filled out an eligibility form with the Florida High School Athletic Association in February 2021, listing her child as female. That was four months before the family had the child’s birth certificate legally changed in July 2021.
“Ms. Norton listed the child as a female when the child was actually still a male, according to the birth certificate,” Honan said during the interview.
Lawyers for Norton argued that the athletic association’s form at the time did not define sex as only sex at birth.
The investigation also revealed that Norton, in her role as information management specialist, changed her child’s name in the school’s computer system. This happened after the family legally changed through Broward Clerk of Courts the child’s name from a male to female name.
“That was a true and lawful change because you had the correct documentation,” Detective Holly Tello acknowledged.
But Tello questioned why Norton didn’t take any action to change her child’s sex back to male in the system, since the state started using sex at birth for the purposes of sports participation.
“As an employee did you feel like you were obligated or should have notified the school of the female sex indicator in [the district computer system]?” Tello asked.
Norton responded no, adding, “She’s a girl.”
Norton and her lawyer became frequently irritated during the interview when investigators would refer to Norton’s child as a male or with masculine pronouns. Starr said the student was one time referred to as “it.”
Starr would not say whether family members planned to attend the School Board meeting on June 18. He said the ordeal has taken a toll on the family, particularly the student, who left Monarch the same day her mother was removed from the school and eventually enrolled in an online school.
“The Norton family is doing everything they can to survive and move forward in this moment. You can imagine, a parent [may lose] their livelihood, a child has lost the structure and social support and extracurricular activates from school. I would be remiss if I would say it’s not challenging. They are a strong and resilient family and they are leaning on their love for each other.”