If you have been paying attention to federal civil rights enforcement this spring, you may have noticed that two very different stories are being told simultaneously – and both of them are true.

On April 30, the DOJ announced investigations into 36 Illinois public schools, examining whether those schools have included sexual orientation and gender identity content in pre-K through 12 classrooms, whether parents were notified of their right to opt out, and whether students have access to single-sex facilities and athletics based on biological sex. The announcement cited Title IX alongside recent Supreme Court precedents on parental rights.

This was not an isolated action. Similar inquiries have already been launched in states including New York, Oregon, and Washington, and the administration has claimed it found evidence of Title IX violations in Kansas and Colorado, as we discussed in this newsletter last week. Last year, the ED and the DOJ jointly established a Title IX Special Investigations Team specifically designed to accelerate and standardize this category of investigation.

That is one story: enforcement is active, targeted, and moving quickly in a specific direction.

Here is the other story: In 2025, OCR reached resolution agreements in only 1% of pending cases (the lowest percentage in over a decade) and entered into zero resolution agreements involving sexual harassment or sexual violence, despite hundreds of cases pending in each of those categories. The near-total pause on sexual harassment resolutions is arguably unlike anything seen since before 2011. This happened against the backdrop of OCR losing roughly half its staff to layoffs and the closure of seven of its 12 regional offices in March 2025.

So what does that mean, taken together?

The federal infrastructure that historically handled the broadest range of civil rights complaints has contracted significantly, while a narrower set of priorities has been elevated and resourced for rapid action. OCR’s only Title IX enforcement work in 2025 was directed at challenging transgender student policies. That is a departure from what compliance officers have navigated for the past decade, and it requires a different kind of situational awareness than most districts or institutions are accustomed to maintaining.

For K-12 schools, the Illinois investigations are a concrete example of what priority-driven enforcement looks like in practice. The Civil Rights Division’s inquiry is examining not just curriculum content, but also parental notification practices and whether access to intimate facilities and athletics is determined by biological sex. That scope means schools, districts, and institutions are being evaluated on documentation, communication practices, and day-to-day implementation, and not just what their written policies say.

Higher education institutions should not read this as someone else’s problem. The administration has also launched and in some cases concluded similar compliance assessments of public universities and community colleges. We recently wrote about the outcome of one at San Jose State University.

When enforcement is reactive and broad, gaps in implementation can go unnoticed for a long time. When enforcement is proactive and targeted, those gaps become the investigation. Compliance teams that can demonstrate consistent, documented practice across the areas under federal scrutiny are simply better positioned no matter the political moment. If your team is thinking about how to build or refresh that foundation before fall, ICS’s fall training calendar for K-12 and higher ed is now open for registration, and it is a great place to start.

This is the conversation ICS is built for. If your team is trying to make sense of what this enforcement environment means for your specific policies and processes, we would welcome that conversation. Reach out and let’s talk through where you are.