To borrow from Yogi Berra, it's déjà vu all over again. On September 29, the U.S. Department of Education published a final rule in the Federal Register repealing the 2024 Title IX regulations and restoring the pre-2024 text (the 2020 regulations) to the Code of Federal Regulations. The rule took effect immediately, without notice and comment. Aside from a few housekeeping items, such as dropping long-expired compliance deadlines and a single sentence from the § 106.45 hearing provisions, the Department describes the rule as simply updating the CFR to match the law already in force.
You may hear that this is cause for policy change, but that is unlikely to be the case for most reading this post. For schools in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming, the 2024 rule was halted from going into effect by court order. This lack of implementation is actually crucial to the Department of Education, which is bypassing standard rulemaking procedures on the basis that most schools never implemented the 2024 regulations anyway.
For KSB Policy Service subscribers, you may recall that we offered multiple options for Title IX policies in the aftermath of the litigation regarding the 2024 rule. We believe those options are each still defensible positions for schools to choose. Subscribers can look in the Policy Portal under 2026 updates for a memorandum explaining the legal rationale for the options in more detail.
Death, taxes, and Title IX updates may be life's constants (we are running out of clichés for these blog posts–Yogi isn’t around anymore to give us new material), but this one should be a quiet one for most. If you have questions about which option makes sense for your district, or what this recodification means for your Title IX team, email us at ksb@ksbschoollaw.com.