By admin For the first time this fall, public colleges in South Carolina will be required to take reasonable steps to ensure that all restrooms and changing facilities afford users privacy from members of the opposite sex.
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Supporters of this “common sense” measure, which the governor signed into law earlier this year, said its passage was necessary to protect the dignity and safety of women and girls.
The law’s critics, who argued it stigmatized transgender people and encouraged the harassment of gender non-conforming individuals, called it a “solution in search of a problem.”
During debate on the legislation, they frequently raised the question of enforcement.
What “reasonable steps” would schools be expected to take to comply with the law? Would a simple sign suffice? Or would schools be required to post security guards outside public restrooms to perform genital checks?
This past week, the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education provided an answer.
The agency, which is tasked with enforcing the Student Physical Privacy Act, said it would leave those decisions up to schools themselves.
A requires only that public institutions of higher education affirm annually their compliance with the law.
“We’re not physically inspecting, we’re not investigating,” the commission’s executive director Jeffrey Perez told the board. “We contact the campuses, say: ‘Are you in compliance with the act?’ They send us a letter back saying, ‘Yes, we are in compliance.’ ”
Perez said the agency, which wanted to make sure it had guidelines in place prior to the new school year, had confirmed with lawmakers that its policy met their expectations.
“We worked very closely with the Legislature to make sure we were meeting their legislative intent,” he said. “And their legislative intent was not for us to have some sort of physical presence on campus.”
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In the event someone alleges a public university has violated the state’s bathroom law, the commission will contact the school and ask it to reattest to its compliance. As long as the school does so within 30 days, it’s in the clear.
If a college or university does not annually attest to its compliance or fails to respond to an assertion of noncompliance within 30 days, it will be found in violation of the law and have a quarter of its state funding withheld the following fiscal year, according to the agency policy.
Schools determined by a court to have violated the bathroom law due to their failure to adequately segregate bathrooms are also subject to withholding, Perez said.
Accommodations for trans students
For transgender people who prefer to use facilities that align with their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth, schools are required to provide at least one single-user restroom and changing area on campus.
Few, if any, of the state’s public institutions of higher learning would have needed to add accommodations to meet the requirement.
A by the South Carolina Department of Revenue and Fiscal Affairs found that none of the state’s public four-year colleges anticipated any costs associated with compliance.
University of South Carolina spokesman Jeff Stensland confirmed Friday that the state’s flagship school would be in compliance with the bathroom law and the higher education commission’s policies.
He also said an online map of single-user and gender-neutral restrooms on USC’s campus would soon be returning to its website.
The student-designed map, which had served as a resource for trans and non-binary students, disappeared from the university’s website last school year around the time USC rebranded its multicultural student affairs office as the Center for Student Engagement.
“We are on track for an updated campus map and signage for single-occupancy restrooms prior to the beginning of the semester,” Stensland said.
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