Carroll Independent School District v. U.S. Department of Education
What’s at stake:
Protections for pregnant and postpartum students
Summary:
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Education published new Title IX regulations. The regulations covered a range of topics, including the rights of LGBTQ+ students, sexual harassment victims, and pregnant and postpartum students. Protections for this last group included explicit rights to lactation breaks in clean spaces and other “reasonable modifications,” such as excused absences to attend prenatal appointments, adjusted deadlines and exam dates, and bigger desks for growing bellies.
In February 2025, in a case brought in the Northern District of Texas by a school district, a judge struck down the entire regulation nationwide. The judge did so even though the school district that brought the suit had only challenged a narrow set of provisions unrelated to pregnancy. After the court’s ruling and after a change in the presidential administration, the Department of Education did not continue to defend the regulation by appealing the court’s decision.
In March 2025, Public Justice and its cocounsel filed a motion to intervene on behalf of A Better Balance, a nonprofit organization that provides legal services for pregnant and postpartum students. A Better Balance asked to join the lawsuit as a defendant so it could appeal the district court’s decision and try to revive the portions of the regulation related to pregnancy.
In May 2025, the district court denied A Better Balance’s motion, holding it lacked standing to intervene because it was not sufficiently injured by the court striking down the regulations. A Better Balance appealed to the Fifth Circuit and argued in briefing that the district court’s vacatur of the regulations harmed its core business activities—the counseling services that it provided pregnant and postpartum students—and that the portions of the regulations challenged by the school district were severable from the pregnancy-related provision, such that the latter should be permitted to go into effect.
But before the case was orally argued and decided, the Fifth Circuit issued an en banc decision in a different case, U.S. v. Texas, that makes it extraordinarily difficult for legal services organizations like A Better Balance to show organizational standing. The Fifth Circuit decision impacted A Better Balance’s appeals in both this case and in a related case in the Sixth Circuit, Tennessee v. McMahon. As a result, Public Justice and a Better Balance made the difficult decision to dismiss the appeals in both cases.
Core legal question:
The school district that brought this lawsuit did not argue that the portion of the regulation that protects pregnant and postpartum students, 34 C.F.R. § 106.40, is unlawful. Rather, it argued — and the district court appeared to accept — that because other parts of the regulation are unlawful, the entire regulation should be struck down. If permitted to appeal, A Better Balance would have argued that the challenged portions of the regulations are severable from the pregnancy-related provisions, and so the latter should be permitted to go into effect.