Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania school boards up window openings that allowed views into its gender-neutral bathrooms
What to Know
- A Pennsylvania school district has reversed course and boarded up window openings it recently installed that allowed people in a middle school hallway to peer into two gender-neutral-designated bathrooms.
- South Western School District Superintendent Jay Burkhart said Friday that the two windows were installed in recent weeks following an August vote by the district’s conservative-majority school board.
- The board president said the move was designed to monitor and prevent misbehavior.
- Such openings weren’t installed in any of the school’s non-gender-neutral bathrooms. Burkhart says the openings were covered by plywood on Thursday on the advice of lawyers from the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center, a conservative legal group the board consulted before ordering the windows installed.
A Pennsylvania school district has reversed course and boarded up window openings it recently installed that allowed people in a middle school hallway to peer into two gender-neutral-designated bathrooms, the superintendent said Friday.
The two windows were installed in recent weeks following a vote in August of the South Western School District’s conservative-majority school board, a move the board president said was designed to monitor and prevent misbehavior. Such openings weren’t installed in any of the school’s non-gender-neutral bathrooms.
The openings were covered by plywood on Thursday on the advice of lawyers from the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center, a conservative legal group the board consulted before ordering the windows installed, Superintendent Jay Burkhart said.
“I believe that we have to protect all of our students,” Burkhart said in a phone interview. “Students are entitled to privacy and I don’t want to violate that.”
The board “has been targeting transgender students and stripping away their rights for a while,” said Kristina Moon, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Education Law Center, which has asked affected students to reach out to it. She said the “multiple tiers and assignments” of bathrooms “overcomplicated a nonissue,” stigmatizing students.
“Now they’ve cut actual holes for windows into the student bathrooms — but only the bathrooms they expect trans and nonbinary children to use. This is a horrifying violation of children’s privacy and cruel discrimination targeted against trans and nonbinary kids,” Moon said in an emailed statement.
The mother of an eighth-grader at Emory H. Markle Middle School in Hanover said Friday that she considered the decision to cover up the windows “a small victory.”
Jennifer Holahan, who drew attention to the bathroom window openings by posting a photo on social media, said she’s “nervous to see” what happens at a meeting next week of the conservative-majority school board.
“This has been a continuing agenda that they’ve had,” Holahan said in a phone interview. “They’ve proved this more than once. I think this is the first time that the school board president has been shut down. And I just wonder what’s to come from that.”
School board president Matthew A. Gelazela, elected as a Libertarian in 2021, told a reporter seeking comment Friday that he considered the call to be criminal harassment and abruptly hung up.
Earlier this week, Gelazela issued a statement defending the bathroom windows as a safety improvement — that “in making the area outside of stalls more viewable, we are better able to monitor for a multitude of prohibited activities such as any possible vaping, drug use, bullying or absenteeism,” the Evening Sun of Hanover reported.
Gelazela’s statement also warned students that they should not consider the bathroom areas outside of the toilet stalls to be private.
Markle Middle School Principal Wes Winters directed questions about the bathroom windows to Gelazela. Board member Justin Lighty declined to discuss the matter, while several other board members and the board’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
In an emailed statement, the ACLU of Pennsylvania described the school board’s policy as discriminatory and one that makes children less safe. The South Western School District has about 4,400 students.
The York Dispatch reported this week that the board has been looking into LGBTQ+ students and bathrooms for more than a year, acting on concerns from unspecified people to establish five bathroom categories: male and female based on sex assigned at birth, male and female based on gender identity, and single-user facilities that are deemed gender neutral.
Gelazela said during an Aug. 14 board meeting that the windows were part of bathroom changes meant to bolster privacy, the Dispatch reported. The vote was 6-3 in favor of adding the windows, though the Evening Sun reported that work had already begun when the vote was taken.
Holahan said the window openings not only allowed people in the hallway to peer into the bathrooms, they also let noises from the bathrooms be heard. Burkhart, the superintendent, said the two gender neutral bathrooms have not been a particular problem for the type of misbehavior Gelazela cited. The renovations cost $8,700, Burkhart said.
At least 11 states have adopted laws barring transgender girls and women from using girls and women’s bathrooms at public schools, and in some cases other government facilities.
As for Pennsylvania, the Education Law Center wrote in a January analysis that federal appeals courts have ruled students have a right to use bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their gender identity. Moon, a senior lawyer for the center, said all children have the right to use an easily accessible bathroom convenient to their classes that affords them true privacy and does not discriminate based on sex and gender identity.
Pennsylvania
Suspect arrested for shooting near basketball court in Elkins Park, Pa.
ABINGTON TWP., Pa. (WPVI) — Police have arrested a suspect who they say fired shots at a vehicle near a crowded basketball court in Montgomery County.
Jamell Whitmore, 18, of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, was arrested on Thursday.
The shooting happened on March 22 near a basketball court on the 300 block of Cadwalader Avenue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.
Shooting near Elkins Park basketball courts sends stray bullet into home
Police said multiple callers reported hearing gunfire around 8:15 p.m. and witnessed a large group of people run from the area behind the McKinley Firehouse.
As a vehicle drove by, one of the men in the group, identified by police as Whitmore, ran off to the parking lot to retrieve a gun and began firing multiple shots towards the vehicle.
Police say it’s unclear if the vehicle was hit, but one of the bullets struck a nearby home.
No one in the home was injured.
Police said no innocent bystanders or those involved in the shooting were injured.
The motive for the shooting remains unknown.
Copyright © 2026 WPVI-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania-born indie rockers Tigers Jaw return with new album release
The chorus for the song “Primary Colors” was something Walsh wrote years ago, with the song’s outro originally being used as a verse.
“And something just wasn’t quite clicking, and everything that I tried felt kind of forced,” Walsh said. “We were all just like, ‘Yeah, there’s something here, but it’s not quite doing what I think it has the potential to do.’”
The band then started toying with the dynamics between the verses and the chorus.
“It just unlocked something for me in the idea where I was like, ‘Wow, this kind of quiet, loud, quiet, loud format really works well with this song,’” Walsh said. “So yeah, it just transformed it instantly into an idea that felt a lot stronger.”
The album was recorded with Grammy-winning producer Will Yip, a relationship still budding from their 2014 album, “Charmer.” Collins said the new album’s sound is “as true as we could be to playing the record live.”
“I wasn’t as tied to the tones that have classically been Tigers Jaw because I think at this point, I’ve just come to this realization that no matter what, if we’re making it, it is Tigers Jaw,” Collins said.
The new album has a “palpable energy” that shares the same spirit as their earlier records, Walsh said. And while “tastes evolve,” the band followed “what feels good.”
“This is the best representation of the band at the time, and it’s almost like a snapshot of us as artists, as people, as a creative entity over this time in our career,” he said.
“Lost On You” is out now through Hopeless Records and is available on vinyl, CD and various streaming platforms.
On April 16, Tigers Jaw will perform at Union Transfer at 8 p.m. They will be supported by Hot Flash Heat Wave and Creeks, the solo project of Balance and Composure vocalist and guitarist Jon Simmons, who is from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania court upends mandatory use of life-without-parole for second-degree murder
What to Know
- Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court says the state cannot automatically give life without parole for felony murder without weighing each defendant’s culpability in the killing.
- The high court on Thursday ordered a new sentencing hearing for Derek Lee over a second-degree conviction, but paused it for four months to give state lawmakers time to consider legislation in response.
- Pennsylvania law has made people liable for second-degree murder if they participated in an eligible felony that led to death. Life with no possibility of parole has been the only possible sentence.
- The court says the current rule treats a lookout the same as the person who kills.
Pennsylvania’s high court on Thursday overturned the use of automatic life sentences without parole for people convicted of second-degree murder, saying it violates the state’s constitutional ban on cruel punishment when imposed without a closer look at the defendant’s specific role and culpability.
The court majority ordered resentencing in the case of Derek Lee, convicted of a 2014 killing in Pittsburgh, but the decision also has implications for others among the roughly 1,000 other inmates currently serving similar second-degree murder sentences.
The court’s order was put on hold for four months to give the General Assembly time to “consider appropriate remedial measures.” In a footnote, the justices said they were ruling on Lee’s sentence and not addressing “questions of retroactivity.”
Prison reform groups hailed it as a landmark decision, while the Allegheny County district attorney’s office said it will follow the court’s order.
Pennsylvania law has made people liable for second-degree murder if they participated in an eligible felony that led to death, and life without parole has been the only possible sentence.
“The mandatory penalty scheme of life without parole for all offenders convicted of second degree murder fails to assess individual culpability regarding the intent to kill, and mandates the same punishment regardless of that culpability,” wrote Chief Justice Debra Todd in the lead opinion. She characterized it as not distinguishing “between the lookout, and the killer who pulls the trigger.”
The state high court’s decision comes after years of advocacy to undo mandatory life without parole sentences both in Pennsylvania and nationally. Nazgol Ghandnoosh of the Washington-based Sentencing Project said she counts 11 states and the federal system as having such laws for that kind of crime, sometimes called felony murder. Several states — California, Colorado and Minnesota — have moved away from that sentencing framework in recent years, she said.
Justice Kevin Dougherty noted in a separate opinion that unlike those convicted of first-degree murder, defendants serving life without parole for second-degree murder have “never been found by a judge or jury to have harbored the specific intent to kill” and may not have had “any involvement whatsoever with the actual killing. He or she does not even have to expect or foresee that a life may be taken.”
Lee’s lawyers had wanted the court to rule that life without parole sentences are unconstitutional for all second-degree murder convictions in Pennsylvania, said Quinn Cozzens, a staff attorney for the Abolitionist Law Center, which helped represent Lee. Instead, the court ruled that trial judges must examine the individual circumstances of a defendant’s case to decide which sentence is most appropriate, including the potential of life without parole.
The state’s public defenders’ association said the ruling will generate new post-conviction litigation and require them to do more investigation as well as develop “strategic litigation” to get the decision to apply retroactively.
A jury convicted Lee of second-degree murder but acquitted him of first-degree murder in 44-year-old Leonard Butler’s shooting death. Butler was shot in a struggle over a gun with Lee’s codefendant, Paul Durham.
Prosecutors argued it should be up to state lawmakers and the executive branch to address the policy issues surrounding second-degree murder sentences. Todd wrote that while the district attorney’s office “acknowledges that there may be persuasive arguments why a non-slayer should not be held to the same degree of culpability as the slayer, it stresses that these are policy decisions for the General Assembly.”
Cozzens urged lawmakers to “address this constitutional violation, given that the court granted them the opportunity to do so.”
Rep. Tim Briggs, a suburban Philadelphia Democrat who chairs the state House Judiciary Committee, said he planned to engage with Senate Republicans on potential legislation in response.
Briggs said he wanted to have decision apply retroactively, to give people serving life “for being the getaway driver” to “have the opportunity to have their facts looked at again.”
“I think inaction leaves a lot of this up to the courts to decide. I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” Briggs said. “We have a policymaking role here.”
Justice Sallie Mundy wrote that Lee “willingly participated in an armed home invasion and robbery, and purposefully engaged in assaultive behavior in the form of tasing and pistol-whipping the victim.” She said Lee and Durham “arguably kidnapped the victims by forcing them into the basement” and it will be up to the county judge to decide if Lee’s life-without-parole sentence is appropriate.
Todd’s opinion, citing an advocacy group, said 73% of those convicted of felony murder in Pennsylvania were 25 or younger when the killing occurred and almost 70% are Black people.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro also responded to the ruling on X.
Today, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for second degree murder are unconstitutional.
I have long believed this law is unjust and wrong. As Governor, I took legal action in this case arguing to strike down this…
— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) March 26, 2026
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