The U.S. Department of Justice has given Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools 14 days to stop enforcing an internal guideline on transgender students or face a federal lawsuit.
The demand letter is dated Jul. 21. It went to the board of education and Superintendent Anna Stubblefield by mail and email that day, the same day the board met in regular session. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division, and Ryan Kriegshauser, the U.S. Attorney for Kansas, signed it. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach received a copy.
The deadline is Aug. 4, a week before the board’s next regular meeting.
Five DOJ demands
The letter says the district is in ongoing, substantial noncompliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal law giving parents the right to inspect and review their children’s education records. The Education Department has partnered with the Justice Department to open enforcement proceedings.
Federal law conditions education funding on a district not maintaining a policy that denies parents that right. The letter argues the guideline does exactly that, and that education records include any note, email, or other document containing information about a student’s transgender status, gender identity, sexual orientation, preferred name, or pronouns.
The letter demands five actions from the district within the two weeks. Stop enforcing the guideline and any related practice restricting disclosure to parents or guardians. Review all district policies against parents’ rights under the act. Issue a written directive to staff. Provide written confirmation, signed by both Stubblefield and the board president, that the first three are done. Produce every version of the guideline in place since 2017.
If the district does not comply, the letter says, a civil action will be filed. The department calls the letter a formal demand and a final opportunity to cure before litigation.
KCKPS staff discussions gone viral
The case rests on recordings that surfaced in a whistleblower video posted late last month which were then redistributed by several nationally-known social media accounts.
On one recording, according to the letter, Assistant Superintendent Canise Salinas-Willich described a transgender guideline that the district did not share with the school community. Certain “gatekeepers” safeguarded it instead, she said. Other recordings captured her discussing secret policies and efforts deliberately kept out of public view.
Salinas-Willich is the district’s assistant superintendent of organizational development and library services and was previously executive director of equity and inclusion. She is in her 14th year with the district, where she began as a building principal.
The letter names a second employee, organizational development specialist Lauren Hernandez, who discussed her willingness to obscure information from a student’s father because of the father’s religious affiliation.
The letter describes that conduct as a coordinated, secret campaign by school administrators to bypass the law.
The guideline
The Sentinel, an online publication of the Kansas Policy Institute, obtained a copy of the transgender guideline in June under the Kansas Open Records Act.
Titled as internal guidance on transgender and gender non-conforming students, it tells any staff member who learns a student is transgender or gender non-conforming to relay that to the principal without delay. The principal then discusses accommodations and resources with the student or the student’s parent or legal guardian. That “or” is the point of contention, since it leaves notification to the parent as one option rather than a requirement.
State law also touches the subject. The Help Not Harm Act, enacted in 2025 over Governor Laura Kelly’s veto, defines social transitioning to include changes to a person’s pronouns or manner of dress, and restricts the use of state funds and state property to promote it, except where the First Amendment requires otherwise. The Justice Department letter rests on federal law, not the state act.
The district’s response
The district has not publicly addressed the letter, though it has answered the underlying findings.
On Apr. 17, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and its Student Privacy Policy Office told KCKPS and three other Kansas districts that they had violated Title IX and the federal records law, based on the agencies’ reading of certain district policies and guidelines.
KCKPS issued a statement three days later disagreeing with that determination and calling it “not supported by the facts or law.” The district said it prohibits discrimination of any type in its programs and activities, and that it has acted and will continue to act “in full good faith compliance” with both laws. It said the same of KSHSAA rules for interscholastic and intramural athletics.
The district said it is dedicated to a safe, supportive environment where every student can thrive, and that it will keep working with students, parents, and guardians. It linked to the policies and guidelines at issue.
The July letter takes up the part of the findings related to parental records access.
Silence at the board table
Carl Stafford, an educator, read the letter’s demands aloud during community comment at the meeting that evening, telling the board it must “cease all enforcement of the transgender guideline” or face litigation.
Then he asked directly. “Do you guys plan to comply with those requests?” Stafford said.
Board President Randy Lopez told him his three minutes were up. “Mr. Stafford, we’re at time. Thank you so much,” Lopez said. Stafford answered that he would take “silence is non-compliance” as his assumption and left the podium.
Several other speakers pressed the board on parental notification, among them Pastor Kelly Lohrke, who described the video in detail, and Pastor Dennis Upton, who told the board that schools are partners to parents and cannot replace them.
Lopez addressed the criticism after community comment closed, without mentioning the letter. “We do not have any policies that break any federal guidelines or policies or laws,” he said.
No board member raised the letter in open session. The board amended its agenda at the start of the meeting to add a fourth executive session for attorney-client consultation, and three of its four closed sessions that night were attorney-client. The board did not provide the subject of any of the consultations.