Center Cass School District 66, which serves students in Woodridge, Darien and Downers Grove, has turned over records to the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a federal investigation into how Illinois schools handle lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Superintendent Andrew Wise confirmed in an email to Patch that the district uploaded DOJ-requested materials in July, tied to a prior school safety grant. "If the Department of Justice has any additional follow-up questions for us, we will continue to work on providing responsive information," Wise said.

The investigation, announced April 30 by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, names 36 Illinois school districts. It examines whether districts include sexual orientation and gender identity content in pre-K through 12th-grade classes, whether parents can opt out, and whether schools limit access to single-sex bathrooms, locker rooms and girls' sports teams based on biological sex.

More than half of the 36 districts are in the Chicago area, according to Capitol News Illinois.

Why Center Cass?

No official explanation has been given for why Center Cass was selected. An emerging theory among some district officials statewide is that the targeted districts all received grants from the DOJ's School Violence Prevention Program. Oregon Community Unit School District 220 Superintendent PJ Caposey raised that possibility on social media but said it was unconfirmed. Wise's reference to a "prior school safety grant" aligns with that theory, though the district has not drawn the connection explicitly.

The DOJ cited Title IX and two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions as its legal basis: Mahmoud v. Taylor (June 2025), which requires schools to let parents opt children out of LGBTQ+-related lessons, and Mirabelli v. Bonta (March 2026), which blocked California policies allowing schools to keep a student's gender transition private from parents.

Illinois law cuts the other direction. A 2019 state law requires public schools to include the roles and contributions of LGBTQ+ people in history curriculum, and students must demonstrate knowledge of that material by eighth grade.

Political response

Gov. JB Pritzker called the probe a "sham investigation" in an April 30 statement, saying the Civil Rights Division is now "focused on belittling the rights and humanity of LGBTQ+ communities." Ed Yohnka, ACLU of Illinois director of communications and public policy, said the administration is wrongly interpreting federal and state law, arguing that students have the right to play on sports teams and use facilities consistent with their gender identity.

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, said in the April 30 announcement that the DOJ intends to stop school authorities from keeping parents uninformed about how sexual orientation and gender identity content is taught in classrooms.

Potential consequences

The DOJ's April 30 press release warned that the named districts receive "hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funding," signaling potential federal funding consequences if violations are found. No hearing date, response deadline or follow-up action has been publicly announced for Center Cass specifically.

The district's administrative offices are at 701 Plainfield Rd. in Downers Grove.