(The Center Square) – Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp on Monday signed a series of education bills, including the Riley Gaines Act of 2025 designed to protect women’s sports.

Senate Bill 1, bars males and females from competing on teams designated for the opposite gender, the governor’s office said in a statement. It also requires restrooms and changing areas that can be used by more than one student to be limited to one gender.

The legislation is in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order entitled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” More than half the states in America have similar legislation, many named for Gaines.

Other educations bills signed into law include one providing financial grants as incentives to local boards of education to approve charter school petitions and prohibiting school systems from unfairly attempting to shut down charter schools.

“As the parents of three daughters, Marty and I know just how important it is to keep our children safe and to give them the best possible start in life,” Kemp said in a statement. “Girls should not have to share a playing field, a restroom, or a locker room with boys and vice versa, and the commonsense legislation I signed today is about what is fair and safe for our children.

“I want to thank the members of the General Assembly for putting the well-being of our students over politics. Like Marty and me, they want to protect their daughters and sons, they want them to grow up and compete in a fair environment, and they want their children to know that political agendas won’t dictate their lives.”

The Riley Gaines Act is named after the former University of Kentucky All-American swimmer who has championed the cause of keeping males out of female sports. It was in the 2022 NCAA Championships in Atlanta, hosted by Georgia Tech, where a Penn swimmer previously spending three years on the men’s team encountered Gaines and other women swimmers sparking multiple litigations – and the fight to protect women’s spaces. 

“Three years after I, and dozens of other Division I female athletes, were forced to compete against a man in a Georgia pool, the Riley Gaines Act of 2025 is now law,” Gaines said in a statement Monday. “It’s an honor of a lifetime to know our stories help shed light on a grave problem of rampant gender ideology that means women are victims of government facilitated sex discrimination.”

GLAAD, a nonprofit organization focused on queer advocacy and cultural change, is critical of the Georgia legislation.

“All students, regardless of gender identity, should have access to play school sports in a safe environment where they can learn and thrive,” CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said in a statement Monday. “With the passage of this discriminatory legislation, Georgia lawmakers have unfairly and baselessly made it more difficult for transgender students to experience the same lessons sports offers all youth, and they have dangerously placed a target on cisgender girls who don’t fit neatly into societal expectations of gender.”

The legislation was sponsored by Sen. Greg Dolezal and carried in the House by Rep. Josh Bonner. It was a legislative priority for both Speaker of the House Jon Burns and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones.

“Today, the General Assembly affirmed our longstanding and ongoing commitment to the safety, success, and well-being of Georgia’s children,” Burns said. “Our children are our future, and their future begins in our education system. That’s why securing our classrooms, strengthening school safety, and increasing access to mental healthcare for our students was a top priority for the House this session, and that’s exactly what HB268 accomplishes. The House also took a stand to restore common sense and fairness for female athletes by championing the Riley Gaines Act. Thanks to the protections set forth by this legislation, female athletes here in Georgia will never be forced to face a biological male on the court, on the field, or in the locker room.”

Also signed by Kemp:

• House Bill 81, sponsored by Rep. Bethany Ballard and carried by Sen. Larry Walker in the Senate, establishes an interstate compact for school psychologists, helping ease the burden on these essential employees in our schools.

• HB307, sponsored by Ballard and carried by Sen. Billy Hickman in the Senate, builds on the work of the Georgia Early Literacy Act by consolidating existing statutory requirements on dyslexia screening so that we can reach students earlier and get them the assistance they need.

• HB235, sponsored by Rep. Rick Townsend and carried in the Senate by Sen. Mike Hodges, entitles public school employees and postsecondary education employees to receive a leave of absence for donation of bone marrow or organs.

• SB82, sponsored by Sen. Clint Dixon and carried by Rep. Scott Hilton in the House, incentivizes local boards of education to approve charter school petitions while preventing school systems from unfairly attempting to shutter these school options.

• SB123, sponsored by Senate President Pro Tempore John Kennedy in and carried by Rep. Matt Dubnik in the House, requires school systems with chronic absenteeism rates of 10% or more to establish an attendance review team to determine the underlying causes of that issue.

• HB268, sponsored by Rep. Holt Persinger and carried by Sen. Bill Cowsert in the Senate, was also a top priority of Jones, Burns and many others in the General Assembly. This bill requires schools to have up-to-date mapping and mobile panic alert systems, requires student records be transferred within five school business days so potential dangers can be addressed quickly, provides for a student advocacy specialist grant program to reimburse districts for hiring said position, requires local boards to offer an anonymous reporting program, and creates the offenses of “terroristic threat of a school” and “terroristic act upon a school.”

These measures are in addition to the multiple rounds of school safety grants provided for in prior years, annualized funding for school safety grants, and legislation requiring schools conduct safety audits.

(The Center Square) — An ongoing effort to establish retroactive term limits in Bossier City receives the final vote by residents on Saturday. 

Back in September, an ordinance establishing term limits for the Bossier City Council members failed to pass despite citizen concerns. The ordinance called for a special election in December proposing no person who has been elected or appointed to serve for three terms is eligible for reelection.

Residents presented a petition during a September city council meeting with roughly 3,000 signatures. 

Nearly nine months later, the parish will vote on the retroactive term limits. If passed, four council members will be ineligible for reelection — Jeff Free, Jeff Darby, David Montgomery and Don Williams. 

A previous JMC analytics poll reported showed between 50%-70% of citizens in each district would approve city council term limits. 

The Bossier City Term Limits Coalition began the argument over retroactive term limits, while the City Council’sprevious proposed charter is prospective term limits. The council originally wanted their prospective term limits to be on the December ballot last year. However, the Louisiana Bond Commission rejected the proposal. The reasoning behind the rejection was for the council’s omittance of the retroactive term limits supported and petitioned for by citizens.

The Center Square previously reported that if the charter passed in the March election, it wouldn’t hinder the retroactive petition version from being added and voted on in future elections depending on how the courts ruled. 

“If this goes forward as it is and it passes I think it could block any further action because the people of Bossier City will feel like they made their decision through their vote and that would mean that there would only be prospective term limits,” John Fleming, state treasurer and commission chair said previously. 

As the May election approaches this week, citizens will cast another vote for term limits as they did in March. 

While the March election did not address retroactive term limits, both propositions received a majority vote to pass some form of term limits for elected officials in Bossier. 

“We think that we’re going to be successful because we’ve made such a stink of this for the last two years,” David Crockett told The Center Square previously. “We think that some of these city councilmen are going to get beat, and we may get control of the council with good people that are not doing this for self-serving purposes.”

Emilee Ruth Calametti serves as staff reporter for The Center Square covering the Northwestern Louisiana region. She holds her M.A. in English from Georgia State University and soon, an additional M.A. in Journalism from New York University. Emilee has bylines in DIG Magazine, Houstonia Magazine, Bookstr, inRegister, The Click News, and the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. She is a Louisiana native with over seven years of journalism experience.

(The Center Square) – The U.S. Department of Education on Monday recognized the ways it says the Trump-Vance administration has returned education to states over its first 100 days, highlighting headway it has made in school choice and more.

The Education Department said that it “has advanced President Trump’s goal to return education to states by empowering parents to make decisions in their child’s education and removing bureaucratic barriers to educational choice.”

The department outlined in its release ways in which Trump’s goals have been made good.

Most prominently, Trump announced in March he would sign an executive order to end the Department of Education in order to return education back to the states, “where it belongs.”

“The United States spends more money on education by far than any other country, but yet we ranked near the bottom of the list in terms of success,” Trump said.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in the same announcement that “education should be tailored to communities,” and “parents should have involvement.”

McMahon also wrote about her unusual mission as Secretary of Education: “to oversee the responsible and permanent closure of the very department I now lead.”

McMahon wrote that the “mandate is twofold: (1) to plan, in coordination with Congress, for eliminating or relocating the functions and operations of the Department of Education, and (2) to ensure that no taxpayer money flows to DEI programs or institutions that embrace DEI.”

“As we begin complying with this executive order, we can also dismantle the last administration’s DEI agenda and reorient civil rights enforcement so that we are protecting all students from harassment and discrimination, including Jewish students studying on elite campuses and female athletes on the field and in the locker room,” McMahon wrote.

As far as school choice, the U.S. Department of Education announced in January its “recognition and celebration of National School Choice Week,” preceding McMahon’s March visit to a New York charter school where she stated that “school choice is crucial.”

To advance what McMahon would later call crucial, the department in January withdrew “two burdensome and misaligned Notices Inviting Application (NIAs)” related to charter schools that were published under Biden and “included excessive regulatory burdens and promoted discriminatory practices.”

The department additionally “reigned in the federal government’s influence over state Charter School Program (CSP) grant awards,” a practice that was also set into motion under Biden.

This means that the requirement that the Secretary of Education “review information on how states approve select entities’ (e.g., private colleges and universities) authorization of charter schools in states where they are already lawful authorizers,” was done away with, returning authority to states and expanding school choice, according to the department.

In March, the department informed chief state school officers of a flexibility in Title I funds that would allow for greater education choice, such as dual enrollment and career and technical education.

States “championing school choice” along with Trump in his first 100 days are Idaho, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming, the last three having all enacted school choice initiatives this year, while Idaho set in motion a Parental Choice Tax Credit program.

To combat ideology coming between children and parents in education, the department launched an “End DEI Portal” that enables individuals to report discrimination based on race or sex in public K-12s.

The department also opened investigations into both California’s and Maine’s education departments for allegedly violating the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA).

FERPA “gives parents the right to access their children’s education records,” according to the U.S. Department of Education

The department said that a new California state law prohibiting “school personnel from disclosing a child’s ‘gender identity’ to that child’s parent” violates FERPA.

Meanwhile, Maine school districts’ policies that “allegedly allow for schools to create ‘gender plans’ supporting a student’s ‘transgender identity’ and then claim those plans are not education records under FERPA and therefore not available to parents” is also a violation, the department said.

In the effort to protect children from what it considers gender ideology, the U.S. Department of Education notified all educational institutions receiving federal funding of their obligation to comply with parental rights laws such as FERPA, stating that education records include those related to gender identity.

“The correct application of FERPA will be to empower all parents to protect their children from the radical ideologies that have taken over many schools,” McMahon said of the department’s directive.

The Department of Education has not yet responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.