Catholic Prep School: We don't accept Transgender Students

Catholic Rhode Island private school Mount Saint Charles Academy is open to everyone as long as they are not transgender.

The latest edition of the Woonsocket school’s parent-student handbook states flatly and without further explanation: “Mount Saint Charles Academy is unable to make accommodations for transgender students.
Therefore, MSC does not accept transgender students nor is MSC able to continue to enroll students who identify as transgender.”

There are no stated exclusions based on race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or any other factor—only transgender status.

The change was implemented in October 2015 but concerned alumni only noticed it recently, GoLocalProv reported. David Coletta, who graduated from MSC in 2009, created a Change.org petition to ask the school to “leave the hateful rhetoric in the past [and] accept trans students.”

Coletta told The Daily Beast that the MSC he knew would never ban transgender students and that the current policy “goes against their own teachings.”

“It’s completely different than how they teach their students to behave,” he said. “We were always taught there to be very accepting and loving of others.”

In a statement to The Daily Beast, the school said that the policy was “not intended to be discriminatory toward transgendered [sic] students” and that it is not the school’s “intent or desire to exclude transgender students.”

MSC did not respond to questions about how it would determine whether or not a prospective student is transgender. Also unknown is whether or not the school has expelled any transgender students under this policy.

“The policy was put in place for the simple reason that Mount Saint Charles feels that its facilities do not presently provide the school with the ability to accommodate transgender students,” the school’s statement read.

But Coletta is certain that transgender students have attended MSC in the past, including one student who graduated a few years before he did. That student, he said, never experienced any issues with bathrooms or locker rooms while at MSC.

“For them to say they can’t accommodate these students is just, in my opinion, a cheap copout because they’ve clearly shown in the past that they can,” he told The Daily Beast.

The targeted nature of the policy appears to have caught many other former students by surprise. At press time, the petition had received over 600 signatures.

Culled fromDaily Beast