Florida’s Broward County school district suspends staffer whose transgender daughter played on a girls’ team
By Carlos Suarez and Denise Royal, CNN
Plantation, Florida (CNN) — A South Florida school district on Tuesday voted to give a 10-day suspension to an employee accused of allowing her transgender daughter to play on a girls’ high school volleyball team in 2022 and 2023 in violation of state law.
The suspension of Jessica Norton, an information management technician and a volunteer junior varsity volleyball coach at Monarch High School in Coconut Creek, was approved in a 5-4 vote by the Broward County school board.
Norton will be moved to a different job after the suspension ends, the board said. Superintendent Howard Hepburn had recommended Norton be fired, citing the district’s investigation of the situation, though board members voting in the majority followed a district committee’s recommendation that Norton be suspended.
After Tuesday’s meeting, Norton expressed mixed feelings about the vote.
“Obviously, I don’t want to get fired from my job. I love my job,” she said. “But I don’t think that the decision for any suspension was correct.”
Norton and several other school staff members were reassigned to non-school sites in November, pending an investigation, after district officials learned her transgender daughter played on the school’s varsity volleyball team. Of the school staff members reassigned in November, only Norton was not cleared of wrongdoing.
Under Florida’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, which was signed into law in 2021 by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, transgender girls are banned from playing on girls’ sports teams at public schools in Florida.
In December, state athletic officials said Monarch High was placed on one-year administrative probation and fined $16,500 for allowing the transgender girl to play on the girls’ volleyball team.
In a three-page letter to Monarch High School’s interim principal, the Florida High School Athletic Association accused the school of violating the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act and an association bylaw, both of which prohibit “biological males” from playing on women’s sports teams at public schools. The transgender student played 33 matches during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 volleyball seasons, the letter stated.
Norton’s daughter, who now attends school virtually, was banned from playing sports for any member school” through November 2024, according to the letter.
In a March response to the investigation, Norton’s lawyers stressed that Norton was a volunteer junior varsity volleyball coach – not a coach for the varsity team – and “had no role, responsibility, or authority in the try-out and selection process for either team, nor in running any practices or coaching in games.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Norton walked out at one point after a board member repeatedly referred to Norton’s daughter as “her son” while reading from a state Department of Education report and making her own observations.
Norton said she has not decided whether she will return to Monarch High School.
“I loved my job, and I loved my students. I loved everything about it. … We’ll see what happens,” she said, adding she would discuss her future at the school with her daughter.
Under Florida’s law, public secondary school and college sports teams are required to be designated based on “biological sex.” The act defines a student’s “biological sex” as the one that was printed on the student’s official birth certificate at or near the time of birth.
The Florida case came amid a nationwide spate of legal backlash against transgender students’ participation in school sports, particularly in Republican-led states.
CNN’s Devan Cole and Holly Yan contributed to this report.
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