A new academic year always brings new compliance challenges, but this one feels different. Federal agencies continue to reshape their priorities, the courts are as active as ever, and schools, districts, and institutions are navigating a legal and regulatory environment that keeps shifting.

We spent a good chunk of our Back-to-School Compliance Webinar walking through this territory, and one theme kept coming up: interagency agreements, court decisions, and enforcement actions are shaping what’s expected of institutions more than any new rule has this year. If you missed the webinar (or want the recording to share with your team), get the replay for K-12 or Higher Ed here.

Here are the five issues we are thinking about heading into the 2026–27 academic year.

1. How Interagency Agreements (IAAs) Could Reshape Coordinated Federal Action

One of the biggest developments this year is that federal agencies have started working together, a shift that may end up mattering more than any single new regulation. We talked about this previously in a past edition of Tuesday Takeaways.

The gist is that the Department of Education has entered into several Interagency Agreements with agencies including the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Labor, among others. These agreements are meant to facilitate information sharing, referrals, and coordinated action across the federal government, and we touched on what this could mean during the webinar.

The real question is how these agreements will actually be used, not simply whether they exist. We’re giving attention to whether agencies begin conducting more coordinated investigations, how often complaints get referred between them, whether priorities start to align across departments, and what coordinated federal oversight looks like once it moves from paper to practice. The answers could fundamentally change how schools, districts, and institutions experience federal oversight in the years ahead.

2. OCR’s K-12 Initiative May Be a Preview of What’s Coming Next

In July, OCR opened a new K-12 initiative aimed at “passing the trash,” the practice of moving a staff member accused of sexual misconduct to another school instead of dealing with the allegation. Alongside new guidance under Title IX and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, OCR opened 20 directed investigations into districts whose 2023-24 Civil Rights Data Collection submissions suggested they weren’t handling staff-on-student misconduct the way the data required.

The initiative is directed at K-12 schools, but higher education should still pay attention. OCR initiatives have a track record of hinting at broader priorities that later show up in investigations across every level of education. Whether this one expands beyond K-12 remains to be seen, but the underlying lesson holds: If OCR is willing to open two dozen investigations off a data review alone, without waiting for a single complaint, then this is worth your attention.

3. Title IX Questions Continue in the Courts

The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. was one of the most significant education rulings of the October 2025 Term. The Court held that states may restrict participation on girls’ and women’s athletic teams based on biological sex without violating Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause, giving states with those laws important legal certainty.

What’s just as important is what the Court did not decide. It didn’t hold that states must adopt that approach, and it didn’t address the legality of state laws or institutional policies that continue to allow transgender students to participate consistent with their gender identity. Schools, districts, and institutions remain subject to different legal requirements depending on the state, and litigation over those laws is likely to continue. Time will tell whether challenges involving states that still permit transgender participation eventually make their way to the Supreme Court.

The upcoming Term also looks consequential. One case already on the docket, Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, asks whether employees of federally funded educational institutions can pursue employment discrimination claims under Title IX. Title VII has traditionally been the primary federal employment discrimination statute, so the Court’s decision here could reshape the relationship between Title VII and Title IX, along with litigation strategy and available remedies for colleges and universities.

And as we have noted in recent Tuesday Takeaways editions, how the Court decides cases matters just as much as what it decides. Its increasingly active emergency docket keeps shaping federal funding, agency authority, and civil rights protections well before cases reach a final merits decision. For compliance professionals, following emergency orders has become just as important as reading the final opinions.

4. Agencies Keep Outpacing the Rulemaking Process

In the past, compliance changes came through new regulations. Increasingly, though, federal agencies are communicating their expectations through investigations, enforcement actions, settlement agreements, Dear Colleague Letters, public initiatives, and litigation instead.

This year, that means paying attention not just to formal regulations but to OCR resolution agreements, Department of Justice litigation, agency guidance, public statements from federal officials, and how these patterns show up across multiple agencies. That’s often the clearest early read on where compliance expectations are headed, well before any rule is proposed.

5. Strategic Compliance Is More Important Than Ever

Maybe the biggest shift underway is that compliance has stopped being the job of a single office. Today’s issues routinely pull in legal counsel, government relations, HR, student affairs, athletics, academic affairs, communications, and governing boards all at once. The schools, districts, and institutions that come out ahead will be the ones that track legal developments early, know the difference between a binding requirement and a stated policy preference, coordinate their response across campus, and document their decision-making before compliance questions land on their desk.

Tuesday Takeaways

If there’s one theme defining this academic year, it is this: compliance is being influenced more by agency action, litigation, and interagency coordination than anything else. We expect things to continue to change and evolve.

We covered much of this in more depth during our Back-to-School Compliance Webinar, and we’ll keep tracking these developments as they unfold. At ICS, our goal is to help you separate legal obligations from emerging trends so your team can make informed, proactive decisions all year long.