(The Center Square) – School systems that do not enforce Georgia’s law banning males from participating in women’s sports could lose state funding but would have opportunities to comply first.
Senate Bill 1, known as the Riley Gaines Act, takes effect Tuesday. It also requires restrooms and changing areas that can be used by more than one student to be limited to one gender.
The legal remedy is simple. A student who feels they are “deprived of an athletic opportunity or suffers any harm as a result of a violation of this Code section” can file a civil action within two years of when the incident took place, according to the bill.
Before an entity can be stripped of state funding for violating the law, several steps must take place.
First, the law requires each entity to designate one person to handle compliance with the law. Once a complaint is filed, the person assigned to handle complaints must make a decision.
If the complainant disagrees with the decision at the school level, an appeals process begins with the local school board or the private school’s governing body.
The next appeal, if the complainant is still not satisfied is made to the state board of education, which will create a corrective plan. The entities have a year to show that it is willfully complying with the plan, according to the bill.
The state Board of Education has a year to determine if the entity is complying with the corrective plan before it sends the file to the Department of Community Affairs for certification. A year after the certification, the board of education can ban entities not complying from competing in interscholastic competition.
Entities that still don’t comply within the year of the competition ban could lose their state funding “in an amount that the state board determines is sufficient to secure the local school system’s or public school’s compliance with this Code section,” according to the bill.
The bill is named after Gaines, a former University of Kentucky All-American swimmer who competed in the 2022 NCAA Championships in Atlanta, hosted by Georgia Tech.
