Transgender sports bill advances to Georgia Senate

by Ty Tagami | Jan 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service

ATLANTA – Sex and school sports are among the first items on the agenda for the Georgia Senate this year, as lawmakers took up legislation Thursday to control participation in team competitions.

A Senate panel heard and passed Senate Bill 1, which would prohibit students from competing on teams that do not match the sex on their birth certificates.

These restrictions already exist at the high school level after the state empowered the Georgia High School Association to enforce restrictions in 2022. But SB 1 would write these rules into law in middle school and in high school — and extend them to higher education. It would also apply to private schools that compete against public schools.

The proposed law would “put a boundary around women’s sport that excludes those who have male advantage,” said Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, the bill’s chief sponsor and the chairman of a special legislative committee that studied the issue late last year.

Public schools would face loss of state funding for failure to comply.

Democrats on the committee pushed back, saying lawmakers should be focusing on learning loss instead. The bill would empower parents to file complaints against athletes, and Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta, said girls misidentified as male could face taunting, with consequences for their mental health.

Several current and former women college swimmers spoke in support of the measure via Zoom. They complained about losing at a 2022 NCAA swim meet at Georgia Tech when Lia Thomas, a transgender student born male, competed against women.

They also complained about having to share a locker room with Thomas.

“This was the pinnacle of our competing careers, but it wasn’t just about losing a trophy or a spot on the podium,” said Kaitlynn Wheeler, who was swimming for the University of Kentucky. “It was about our dignity.”

Critics said the bill’s supporters were cherry-picking one well-known incident and that they were pushing a solution to something that isn’t really a problem. 

A girl’s athletic coach said she’d never heard of another such incident in Georgia. A lawyer with Lambda Legal, which advocates for transgender people, said the bill would invite lawsuits and that taxpayers would bear the cost because transgender students have won against such prohibitions in other states.

A transgender person called the bill “dehumanizing,” and a pediatrician said it would undermine mental health.

“Transgender girls are not predators. They’re children, they’re students,” said Dr. Jodi Greenwald, of Roswell. Excluding them from sports would lead to ostracization, she said. “They fall into depression and often commit suicide.”

The vote to pass SB 1 out of the Senate Education and Youth Committee was 9-3, with Sen. Freddie Powell Sims, D-Dawson, the lone Democrat to join the Republican majority. It now heads to the full Senate.

Georgia student scores mostly unchanged in national test

by Ty Tagami | Jan 29, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service

ATLANTA – Scores on a biennial federal test for Georgia fourth and eighth graders show that students on the whole are not progressing enough to regain academic losses sustained during the pandemic.

“Overall, student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic performance,” said Peggy G. Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects and analyses education data.

The U.S. agency administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known informally as the nation’s report card. It is given to a sampling of students at two grade levels nationwide. It is the only government measure that allows comparisons between the states.

“Where there are signs of recovery, they are mostly in math and largely driven by higher-performing students,” Carr said. “Lower-performing students are struggling, especially in reading.” 

Georgia’s average scores moved a bit, but the changes were considered statistically insignificant: reading dropped two points in fourth grade and one point in eighth grade while math rose a point in fourth grade and dropped two points in eighth grade.

Georgia’s fourth grade students matched the national average in reading and their score was not statistically different from the nation’s in math, according to the Georgia Department of Education. The state’s eighth grade students beat the national average in math by two points but scored three points lower in math.

“Multiple data points indicate we are moving in the right direction, but more work is needed,” State School Superintendent Richard Woods said.

Woods predicted NAEP scores will rise over time because of increases in results on the Georgia Milestones tests after new math standards were implemented several years ago. He said recent state mandates in literacy instruction could improve reading scores as new literacy coaches are added to schools.