PORTLAND, Maine — The deadline has arrived for Maine officials to reach a resolution with the U.S. Education Department over a finding that the state violated antidiscrimination laws by allowing transgender athletes to participate in girls’ sports.

The Education Department said in March that an investigation concluded the Maine Department of Education violated the federal Title IX law by allowing transgender girls to participate on girls’ teams. The investigation followed a public disagreement between Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills and President Donald Trump at a February meeting of governors.

The U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a final warning on March 31 telling the state it needed to comply with the law in 10 business days or face enforcement from the U.S. Justice Department. That deadline arrived Friday.

Maine education officials have declined to comment on the investigation. Trump has said the state risks losing federal funding if it does not come into compliance.

“The Maine Department of Education’s indifference to its past, current, and future female athletes is astonishing. By refusing to comply with Title IX, MDOE allows — indeed, encourages — male competitors to threaten the safety of female athletes, wrongfully obtain girls’ hard-earned accolades, and deny females equal opportunity in educational activities to which they are guaranteed under Title IX,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Federal funding is critical to Maine schools. Maine got $358 million in federal funding for K-12 schools in 2021-22, or 10% of its budget, according to data from the Census. About 13% of that money went to Title I, 14% to special education and 20% to child nutrition programs such as school lunches.

Almost half of federal funds were simply marked as “other,” which likely points to the substantial COVID relief funds schools got that year. Prior to the pandemic, Maine got 6% of its funding from federal sources, almost $185 million in 2018-19.

The issue of school funding and transgender participation in sports in Maine began to bubble up when Mills and Trump sparred over the subject during the February meeting at the White House. During the meeting, Trump threatened to pull federal funding from Maine if the state did not comply with his executive order barring transgender athletes from sports.

Mills responded: “We’ll see you in court.”

Soon after, the Education Department and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched investigations into the state.

Health and Human Services officials said in March that the Maine Department of Education, Maine Principals’ Association and a high school are each in violation of Title IX because of the participation of transgender athletes. The Health Department has already referred the issue to the Justice Department for enforcement in court.

The principals’ association and school district both said they would not comply with a proposed agreement to ban the athletes. The Maine education department declined to comment.

Maine Republicans, who are in the minority in both houses of the Legislature, have put pressure on state Democrats to resolve the investigations. House Republican Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, speaking during a news conference, said Mills has created a “hostage situation” that jeopardizes federal funding.

“The governor, and her administration, is holding Maine schools and Maine education under hostage,” Faulkingham said. “This standoff is not going to end well for the state of Maine and its education funding.”

LGBTQ+ rights groups in Maine have defended the state’s approach. “We’re not giving in, and we’re not giving up on our trans community,” EqualityMaine said in a social media post.

Federal authorities have also said they are investigating Maine due to claims school districts in the state violate federal law by withholding information about students’ gender transitioning from parents.

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Associated Press writer Sharon Lurye in New Orleans contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s Title IX rules expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students have been struck down nationwide after a federal judge in Kentucky found they overstepped the president’s authority.

In a decision issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves scrapped the entire 1,500-page regulation after deciding it was “fatally” tainted by legal shortcomings. The rule had already been halted in 26 states after a wave of legal challenges by Republican states.

President-elect Donald Trump previously promised to end the rules “on day one” and made anti-transgender themes a centerpiece of his campaign.

The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia.

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti called it a rejection of the Biden administration’s “relentless push to impose a radical gender ideology.”

“Because the Biden rule is vacated altogether, President Trump will be free to take a fresh look at our Title IX regulations when he returns to office,” Skrmetti said in a statement.

The Education Department did not immediately comment on the decision.

The Biden administration ignited controversy when it finalized the new rules last year. The regulation expanded Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding discrimination based on sex in education, to also prevent discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. It also widened the definition of harassment to include a broader range of misconduct.

Civil rights advocates hailed it as a victory, saying it gave LGBTQ+ students new recourse against discrimination. But it drew outrage from conservatives who said it could be used to protect transgender athletes in girls’ sports.

The rule didn’t explicitly address athletics and mostly detailed how schools and colleges were required to respond to cases of discrimination and sexual assault. A separate proposal dealing with transgender athletes in sports was put on the back-burner and later revoked after it became a focal point of Trump’s campaign.

In his decision, Reeves found the Education Department overstepped its authority by expanding the scope of Title IX.

There’s nothing in the 1972 law suggesting that it should cover any more than it has since Congress created it, Reeves wrote. He called it an “attempt to bypass the legislative process and completely transform Title IX.”

The judge also found that it violated free speech rights by requiring teachers to use pronouns aligning with a student’s gender identity.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” Reeves wrote.

Rather than carve out certain aspects of the rule, Reeves decided it was best to toss the regulation in its entirety and revert to a previous interpretation of Title IX. He said his decision will “simply ‘cause a return to the status quo’ that existed for more than 50 years prior to its effective date.”

Among the biggest critics of the rule was Betsy DeVos, former education secretary during Trump’s first term. On the social media site X, she wrote that the “radical, unfair, illegal, and absurd Biden Title IX re-write is GONE.”

Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said Biden’s rule “betrayed the original intent of Title IX by removing longstanding protections that ensured fairness for women and girls.”

“With President Trump and a Republican majority in Congress, we will ensure women and girls have every opportunity to succeed on the field and in the classroom,” Cassidy said in a statement.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Nearly a decade ago, intense protests over racial injustice rocked the University of Missouri’s flagship campus, leading to the resignation of two top administrators. The university then hired its first-ever vice chancellor for inclusion, diversity and equity. Tensions were so high that football players were threatening a boycott and a graduate student went on hunger strike.

Today, the entire diversity office is gone, an example of changes sweeping universities in states led by conservatives, and a possible harbinger of things to come nationwide.

“I feel like that is the future, especially for the next four years of Trump’s presidency,” said Kenny Douglas, a history and Black studies major on the campus in Columbia, Missouri.

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, both conservative and liberal politicians say higher education changes in red parts of America could be a road map for the rest of the country.

Dozens of diversity, equity and inclusion programs have already closed in states including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas. In some cases, lessons about racial and gender identity have been phased out. Supports and resources for underrepresented students have disappeared. Some students say changes in campus climate have led them to consider dropping out.

During his campaign, Trump vowed to end “wokeness” and “leftist indoctrination” in education. He pledged to dismantle diversity programs that he says amount to discrimination, and to impose fines on colleges “up to the entire amount of their endowment.”

Many conservatives have taken a similar view. Erec Smith, a research fellow at the free-market Cato Institute whose scholarship examines anti-racist activism and Black conservatism, said DEI sends the message that “whiteness is oppression.” Diversity efforts are “thoroughly robbing Black people and other minorities of a sense of agency,” he said.

The New College of Florida, a tiny liberal arts institution once known as the most progressive of Florida’s public campuses and a refuge for LGBTQ+ students, became a centerpiece for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “war on woke.” DeSantis overhauled the school’s Board of Trustees in 2023, appointing a new majority of conservative allies, including culture war strategist Christopher Rufo.

Many faculty departed last year, leaving vacancies that the new leadership has filled with a variety of conservative academics — and non-academics, including British comedian and conservative commentator Andrew Doyle, who will be teaching a new course this January called “The Woke Movement.”

“This is only the beginning,” Rufo wrote in the forward to school President Richard Corcoran’s new book, “Storming the Ivory Tower.”

Trump’s opponents dismiss his depictions of liberal indoctrination on campuses as a fiction. But conservatives point to diversity programs and the student debt crisis as evidence colleges are out of touch.

“What happens if you are an institution that’s trying to change society?” asked Adam Kissel of the conservative Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025, a sweeping anti-DEI blueprint for a new GOP administration that Trump has disavowed while nominating some of its authors for administrative roles. “Society will push back on you.”

Pushback is exactly what DEI programs have faced.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, in March signed into law a bill barring state funding for public colleges that advocate for “divisive concepts” including that someone should feel guilty because of their race or gender. The law also states people at schools and colleges must use the bathroom that matches their gender assigned at birth.

The effects of the anti-DEI law rippled through campuses including the University of Alabama and Auburn University, the state’s two largest four-year colleges. DEI offices and designated areas for LGBTQ+ and Black students closed when classes started in late August — just before the law took effect.

Dakota Grimes, a graduate student in chemistry, was disappointed when Auburn University closed the campus’ Pride Center, a designated safe space for LGBTQ+ people and allies. Grimes’ organization, Sexuality and Gender Alliance, still meets regularly in the library, she said, but LGBTQ+ students don’t feel as welcome on campus. Students are subjected to homophobic and transphobic slurs, Grimes said.

“They don’t feel safe just sitting in the student center because of the kind of environment that a lot of students and even teachers create on campus,” Grimes said.

Julia Dominguez, a political science senior at the University of Alabama and president of the Hispanic-Latino Association, said funding for the group’s annual Hispanic Heritage Month festival was pulled two weeks before the event in September. Students who were once excited about being at a school that celebrates Latino culture, she said, are now feeling dejected and disillusioned.

The organization isn’t giving up, Dominguez said.

“We are still present,” Dominguez said. “We are still doing the work. It’s just harder now. But we’re not going to allow that to steal our joy because joy is resistance.”

In Idaho, DEI programs have been under attack for years, with Republican lawmakers blasting efforts to build an inclusive culture as “divisive and exclusionary.” In recent sessions, the Legislature has blocked colleges and universities from using taxpayer dollars on campus DEI programs. A 2024 law banned written “diversity statements” in higher education hiring and student admissions.

In December, the State Board of Education scrapped DEI offices, causing shockwaves at the University of Idaho. Doctoral student Nick Koenig is considering leaving the state.

“Where do your true values lie?” asked Koenig, who decided to move to Idaho to research climate change after a Zoom call with the then-director of the school’s LGBT center. “It’s not with the students that are most marginalized.”

So far, nearly all of the threats to DEI have come from state legislatures, said Jeremy Young, of the free-expression group PEN America.

“There hasn’t been much support at the federal level to do anything,” he said. “Now, of course, that’s going to change.”

Young anticipates that diversity considerations will be eliminated for research grants and possibly for accreditation. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights typically investigates discrimination against people of color, but under Trump, that office could start investigating diversity programs that conservatives argue are discriminatory.

Republicans also may have more leeway to take action at the state level, thanks to an administration that’s “going to get out of the way of red states and let them pursue these policies,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow who studies higher education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Colleges are also cutting some programs or majors seen as unprofitable. Whether politics plays into decisions to eliminate certain courses of student remains to be seen.

Douglas, the University of Missouri student, is concerned. He said the promise of change that followed the earlier protests on the Columbia campus has dissipated.

This fall, a student group he is part of had to rename its Welcome Black BBQ because the university wanted it to be “welcoming to all.” The Legion of Black Collegians, which started in 1968 after students waved a Confederate flag at a football game, complained the change was erasing its visibility on campus.

For Douglas and many others, the struggle for civil rights that prompted diversity efforts isn’t a thing of the past. “White people might have moved past it, but Black people are still experiencing it,” he said.

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Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri; Gecker from San Francisco; Richert from Boise, Idaho; Morris from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. AP Education Writer Alia Wong contributed from Washington.

The U.S. Department of Education said Friday it has reached an agreement with the University of California system resolving complaints from Jewish and Muslim students of discrimination and harassment during protests last spring over the war in Gaza.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights said it investigated nine complaints against University of California schools in Los Angeles (UCLA), Santa Barbara, San Diego, Davis and Santa Cruz. The complaints alleged the schools failed to respond effectively to antisemitic and anti-Arab harassment.

The civil rights office concluded the universities “appear not to have responded promptly or effectively” to allegations of discrimination and harassment that were brought to the administrations’ attention.

Under the agreement, the schools must step up reporting of complaints to the OCR office and review all complaints and reports of harassment from the past two academic years to determine if further action is needed. The agreement also calls for more training of university employees and campus police officers about their obligations under federal law.

The University of California system said the agreement is one of several steps it is taking to ensure its campuses are respectful and welcoming to all.

“Ensuring an inclusive University environment requires sustained focus and action,” the system said in a written statement.

Colleges and universities nationwide saw tension and at times violence erupt on campuses after the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, with dueling campus rallies and widespread allegations of antisemitism and anti-Arab harassment.

The Department of Education has been investigating dozens of complaints that campuses violated Title VI, which bars discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color and national origin at colleges and universities that receive federal funding. Examples of harassment can include slurs, taunts, stereotypes, name-calling and racially motivated attacks or hateful conduct, according to the department’s website.

The department reached a similar agreement with Brown University in July.

A separate investigation found the University of Cincinnati did not respond appropriately to reports of harassment, the Office of Civil Rights said Friday. Examples from some two dozen complaints include a Palestinian student who reported receiving death threats, which the university did not investigate, and an anonymous complaint that a Jewish student’s home was egged and smeared with feces.

The University of Cincinnati said in a statement it will review its policies and previously filed complaints, and take steps “to practively enhance ongoing efforts to prevent discrimination and harassment.” The university said it investigated the complaint of vandalism at the Jewish student’s home, which was made directly to the federal office, but found no reports or evidence of the incident.

UCLA’s handling of dispersing its encampment in the spring drew widespread criticism. Chaos erupted after hundreds of protesters defied orders from campus police to leave the encampment. One night, counter-protesters attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment, throwing traffic cones and firing pepper spray, with fighting that continued for hours before police stepped in.

The investigation into UCLA stemmed partly from concerns of compliance related to about 150 reports the school received about rallies in October and November 2023 as well as a pro-Palestinian encampment in the spring, the department said.

“Of particular concern were reports of violence against students of Jewish ancestry … and of a violent assault by counter-protesters on pro-Palestinian protesters” at the encampment, the department said.

At rallies, protesters chanted “death to Israel” and “no peace until they’re dead,” the department said. At the encampment, protesters maintained checkpoints that excluded Jewish students from the protest area and parts of the campus, prompting the school’s chancellor to issue a statement saying Jewish students on campus, among others, felt “a state of anxiety and fear.”

Muslim and Palestinian students experienced “unwanted filming, doxing, and being followed” on or near the UCLA campus, the department said. A task force report cited by the department said counter-protesters heckled people inside the encampment, saying things like, “you’re a jihadist,” and “you’re a terrorist.”

The four other UC campuses also had “widely reported incidents” of alleged harassment against students, the civil rights office said. UC Santa Barbara was notified of antisemitic vandalism at a dorm and signs posted at a student center that targeted Jewish students by name; UC San Diego and UC Davis also received complaints about students experiencing or witnessing antisemitic comments or actions by students and professors.

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The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The U.S. Justice Department and the city of Louisville have reached an agreement to reform the city’s police force after an investigation prompted by the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, officials said Thursday.

The consent decree, which must be approved by a judge, follows a federal investigation that found Louisville police have engaged in a pattern of violating constitutional rights and discrimination against the Black community.

Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg said the “historic content decree” will build upon and accelerate, this transformational police reform we have already begun in Louisville.” He noted that “significant improvements” have already been implemented since Taylor’s death in March 2020. That includes a city law banning the use of “no-knock” warrants.

The Justice Department report released in March 2023 said the Louisville police department “discriminates against Black people in its enforcement activities,” uses excessive force and conducts searches based on invalid warrants. It also said the department violates the rights of people engaged in protests.

“This conduct harmed community members and undermined public trust in law enforcement that is essential for public safety,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “This consent decree marks a new day for Louisville.”

Once the consent decree is agreed upon, a federal officer will monitor the progress made by the city.

The Justice Department under the Biden administration opened 12 civil rights investigations into law enforcement agencies, but this is the first that has reached a consent decree. The Justice Department and the city of Springfield, Massachusetts announced an agreement in 2022 but the investigation into that police department was opened under President Donald Trump’s first administration.

City officials in Memphis have taken a different approach, pushing against the need for a Justice Department consent decree to enact reforms in light of a federal investigation launched after Tyre Nichols’ killing that found Memphis officers routinely use unwarranted force and disproportionately target Black people. Memphis officials have not ruled eventually agreeing to a consent decree, but have said the city can make changes more effectively without committing to a binding pact.

It remains to be seen what will happen to attempts to reach such agreements between cities and the Justice Department once President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House. The Justice Department under the first Trump administration curtailed the use of consent decrees, and the Republican president-elect is expected to again radically reshape the department’s priorities around civil rights.