The principal and two employees of a Florida high school who were reassigned amid a controversy involving a transgender student athlete who played on a girls’ sports team will be resuming their responsibilities after an investigation cleared them, county public school officials said Tuesday.
James Cecil, principal of Monarch High School in Coconut Creek, along with assistant principal Kenneth May and athletic director Dione Hester, will resume their responsibilities Wednesday, Broward County Public Schools spokeswoman Keyla Concepcion said. in a statement.
Concepcion said the district’s Special Investigative Unit cleared them “of the allegations” but said “the investigation relating to other aspects remains ongoing.”
Cecil and the staff were reassigned to non-school sites after an investigation into allegations of improper student participation in sports was launched in November.
The school was later reprimanded and fined after state officials said a transgender student-athlete was allowed to play on a women’s volleyball team for two seasons in violation of Florida law.
A Florida statute says that athletic teams or sports designated for women, women, or girls are not open to male students, and says that a “statement of a student’s biological sex on the student’s official birth certificate is deemed to have declared correctly determine the student’s biological sex at birth if the declaration was filed at or near the time of the student’s birth.”
The school was fined $16,500 and placed on administrative probation for a full year.
The fine represents $500 for each of the 33 volleyball competitions the transgender athlete participated in for Monarch in the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 seasons.
The school appealed the fine earlier this year.
Some Monarch High students protested the employee relocation and held strikes and demonstrations in support of the student-athlete.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
