By TIFFANY CAMHI/Oregon Public Broadcasting

The Oregon Department of Education is the latest institution in the state to be targeted by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. This time it’s over alleged violations of Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools.

The federal Education Department announced Friday that civil rights investigators will look into allegations that ODE has allowed transgender females to compete in women’s sports.

“The Trump administration will not allow educational institutions that receive federal funds to continue trampling upon women’s rights,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor in a statement Friday.

Oregon’s public K-12 schools are primarily funded by state dollars. Nearly 11% of public school funding in the state came from federal sources in the 2020-2021 school year, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. But if ODE is found to be in violation of Title IX, the U.S. Department could stop the flow of federal funding to the state.

Federal investigators opened the probe after the conservative-leaning nonprofit America First Policy Institute filed a complaint against ODE, according to the announcement. The complaint alleged that multiple high school female athletes in Oregon lost out on awards and other opportunities due to state policies allowing transgender women to participate in competitions.

ODE declined to comment on the investigation, citing pending litigation.

State education officials follow Oregon’s nondiscrimination law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender identity.

The federal Education Department contends that federal law overrides state law and that “ODE and its member schools remain subject to Title IX and its implementing regulations.”

The complaint that the investigation is based on also targets the Oregon School Activities Association, a nonprofit group that regulates high school athletics in the state.

The complaint alleges OSAA’s student athlete participation policies, which were developed with ODE, violate civil rights law “by allowing students to participate in athletics based on their gender identity, not their biological sex.”

A spokesperson with OSAA said the organization is reviewing the complaint with its legal counsel.

This case is part of a larger spree of Title IX investigations that have been launched by the Education Department since February, which follows directives made in President Donald Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order from February.

State education departments, school districts, athletic associations and colleges across the country have all been targeted for their policies governing transgender student athletes.

The federal civil rights office opened an investigation in March into Portland Public Schools and the OSAA over sex discrimination in sports. That investigation was spurred after a McDaniel High School transgender athlete, who identifies as female, took home first-place awards in a Portland meet.

Investigations of this kind typically take months to complete. If violations are discovered, the federal Education Department would likely propose ways for ODE to come back into compliance before taking any punitive action.

A similar investigation into the California Department of Education offers some insight into what a proposed resolution might look like.

In that case, federal officials recommended that CDE forbid transgender athletes from participating in girls’ sports, adopt “biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female,’” follow federal Title IX from the Trump administration guidance, confiscate titles awarded to trans female athletes and compose written apologies to female athletes.