This year, the U.S. Department of Education quietly stripped years of data on bullying against transgender and nonbinary students out of its own civil rights survey — the same survey nearly every public school in the country reports to every two years. Numbers that once showed how many students faced harassment based on gender identity, and whether their districts had policies to stop it, were replaced with a code reading "Suppressed in Compliance with Executive Order," according to an Associated Press analysis of the data.

This isn't a debate about ideology. It's a decision that makes it impossible for parents, teachers, and school boards to know whether the kids in their own hallways are safe. You can't fix a problem you're not allowed to measure. Roughly 1,800 school districts had already collected this information before it was scrubbed from public view — the data existed, and someone chose to hide it.

"We're losing the granular experience of those kids," said Seth Galanter, a former Education Department civil rights attorney, according to The Associated Press. "They exist in the world, their schools acknowledge their existence, but we now no longer have any way to have any kind of local, state or national picture about these kids and what their school experience is like."

Every parent wants their child's school to know when bullying is happening and to be held accountable for stopping it — no matter how you feel about the politics surrounding gender identity. Erasing the data doesn't erase the bullying. It just erases the evidence.

Sign the petition to demand the Department of Education restore this bullying and harassment data now — before another year goes by with no one keeping count.