Florida’s Broward County school board voted 5-4 to suspend Jessica Norton, an information management specialist at Monarch High School, for 10 days.

Her infraction?

Norton failed to register her transgender daughter as male when the now-16-year-old started high school.

It started in November 2023, when Broward County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Peter Licata reassigned Monarch High School Principal James Cecil, Assistant Principal Kenneth May, athletic director, and coach Dione Hester, and Norton after receiving a complaint that a transgender athlete had competed on the girls’ volleyball team.

The reassignments triggered student protests at Monarch High, including a student-led walkout.

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A month later, the Florida High School Athletic Association penalized Monarch for breaking the law, fining it $16,500 dollars, issuing a letter of reprimand that will remain “a permanent part of it membership record,” placing the school on probation for year, and suspending Norton’s daughter from participating in any sports for a year.

The FHSAA also ordered Monarch to require its administrators, employees, and athletic staff to attend seminars and workshops on how to comply with Florida’s “Fairness in Women’s Sports” law.

The investigation revealed that Norton’s daughter began taking puberty blockers at age 11 and has since begun receiving hormone therapy.

The girl is small and slight, and often sat on the bench during her freshman and sophomore years, even as the girls’ volleyball team racked up a 13-7 record last season. Three teammates told investigators they either knew or had suspected Norton’s daughter was transgender, but were unbothered by her presence on the team. They also said that she had never showered with her other teammates or changed clothes in their presence.

Eventually, the school district’s investigation cleared Cecil, May, Hester, and coach Alex Burgess of any wrongdoing, allowing them to return to campus. The investigation into Norton, however, continued. 

Norton came under suspicion because she and her husband, along with their daughter, had signed on as plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking to challenge Florida’s transgender athlete ban. The lawsuit, filed in 2021, when Norton’s child was still in middle school, was dismissed by a federal judge.

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School district officials alleged that Norton had somehow abused her position to change the gender marker on her daughter’s school records — an assertion ultimately disproven.

In fact, investigators found that even though Norton had enrolled the youngest of her three children as a boy for kindergarten, she asked a school employee to change the child’s gender marker to female two years later, reports The Associated Press.

Norton told investigators that she had been told that was the proper procedure for changing the gender on a student’s school records by former Superintendent Robert Runcie. The district says that such changes should have only been allowed once the student’s official birth certificate had been amended. The Nortons did not officially change their daughter’s birth certificate until 2021, four years after Norton began working for the district. 

School board members — including all three Republican members and most of the board’s Democrats — were left to argue that Norton violated district policy and should have requested, once she began working for the district in 2017, that her child’s gender be changed back to male on her school records.

It was that failure to amend her daughter’s school records that was the crux of the district’s finding of alleged “wrongdoing” — even though it occurred four years before the transgender athlete ban was passed. 

Some board members attacked Norton for marking “female” as her child’s “sex at birth” on a permission form for her daughter to participate on the volleyball team, despite knowing of the trans athlete ban. But by then, the gender marker on Norton’s daughter’s birth certificate had been amended to read “female.”

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The district’s special investigation unit recommended a 10-day suspension for Norton.

Superintendent Howard Hepburn, who was named to his current position in April — well after the investigation had started — had recommended that Norton be fired for violating the transgender athlete ban.

The suspension will be carried out once the school year resumes on August 12.

Supporters of Norton argued that the district’s investigation was flawed and that she was unfairly being scapegoated for not registering her daughter as “male” upon entering high school. The Human Rights Campaign even alleged that the district’s investigation was “careless” and “fraught with anti-transgender bias, mischaracterizations, and factual inaccuracies,” including some investigators labeling Norton’s daughter as “it.”

HRC also noted that, even though other school personnel were aware of the student’s transgender identity, it was only Norton — whose actual job has nothing to do with setting school athletic policy — who was ultimately punished.

Norton insisted that the actions she took were to affirm her daughter’s identity, and not to intentionally violate the law.

She said that it has been heartbreaking to see her daughter — who had been elected freshman and sophomore class president, selected as the student body’s director of philanthropy, and voted homecoming princess during her time at Monarch — forced to enroll in virtual classes and be separated from the friends she made.

The girl stopped attending school in person and began attending class online shortly after the investigation launched.

“I saw the light my daughter’s eyes gleam with future plans of organizing and attending prom, participating and leading senior class traditions, speaking at graduation, and going off to college with the confidence and joy that any student like her would after a successful and enriching high school experience,” Norton told the board at a June 18 meeting. “I watched as that light was extinguished. She walked out of the front door of the school, distraught, never to be heard from again.

“Not one person in the District who is responsible for her checked-in on her safety or well-being,” Norton added. “They claim to care about all students but they didn’t care about my child. … The truth is they stopped caring about all LGBTQ students.”