Education Across the States — News Update
October 28, 2026 · By Charles Mayfield, Executive Producer
The United States Department of Justice has sued one of Maryland's largest school systems in federal court, and the fight is over what a school may keep in a student's record without telling that student's parents. On Tuesday, October 27, the department's Civil Rights Division filed the lawsuit against the Board of Education of Anne Arundel County in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. Anne Arundel County Public Schools runs 128 schools and serves more than 84,000 students. The complaint alleges that the district's gender identity policies violate two federal laws: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment. Those are allegations in a complaint. No court has ruled, and the district disputes them.
The complaint alleges that the district directs staff to solicit, document, and act on a student's self-identified name, pronouns, and gender identity without notifying parents; that it designates that information as confidential and instructs staff to withhold it from parents based on what the department calls a unilateral and unfounded assertion that informing parents would pose a safety concern; and that it reports the information to the Maryland State Department of Education without parental notice or a chance to challenge its accuracy. The department asks the court for an injunction stopping enforcement of the policy, and an order giving parents that opportunity to challenge and correct their children's records.
The two laws explain why this reaches every Maryland family. Under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, parents may inspect and review their children's education records and correct or delete inaccurate information in them. Under the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, parents may give or withhold consent before a school collects sensitive personal information from a minor student. The department's theory is that a name, pronoun, or gender identity entry maintained by a school is education record information, and that collecting it one on one from a student triggers those rights. Anne Arundel answered the same evening: it disagrees with the allegations, stands by its compliance with both laws, says it has been in regular contact with the department in a good faith effort to resolve its concerns, called the decision to sue regrettable, and will address the claims in its court filings.
One complication will matter. At the start of this school year, the district already revised its approach. Reporting by The Baltimore Banner says the district made clear that its policy does not block parents' rights under the federal privacy law, that a student's gender identity will not be treated as confidential medical information, and that staff can no longer use a student's preferred name if the parents oppose it — and the superintendent wrote in August that no policy or practice may limit parental rights under that law.
Takeaway: The next document is the one that counts: the district's first court filing, which we will report when it is filed. The legal question is narrower than the headline — not only what the written policy said in earlier years, but whether practice inside schools still matches what the Justice Department describes after the August revision. Because both laws apply in every Maryland school system, a ruling on what counts as an education record would not stop at the county line.
Listen: Maryland Education Daily — October 28, 2026: The Justice Department Sues Anne Arundel, and today's Maryland Deep Dive, "The Records Case," on the same page · State page: Maryland — Education Across the States
Sources: the Justice Department complaint as reported October 27, 2026 by The Baltimore Banner and Reuters, and the Anne Arundel County Public Schools statement of October 27, 2026, as covered in today's episodes, which publish their sources in their episode descriptions.