Voters in Nebraska, Washington, Colorado, Arizona and Alabama are being asked to settle school policy at the ballot box in the 2026 midterm season, with measures that would lock in fights over transgender athletes and, in Alabama, prayer in public schools. The push reflects a broader strategy by activists to move education disputes out of legislatures and into state constitutions, where they are harder to undo.
In Nebraska, the campaign called Fairness for Girls wants voters to enshrine in the state constitution an existing law that bars transgender students from girls' and women's sports teams. The proposal would also require school teams to be designated as male, female or co-ed. Fairness for Girls said it turned in 211,000 signatures in June, and had $3.1 million in cash contributions as of July 31, all from Restore the Good Life Inc.
Washington and Colorado will see similar measures on the ballot through citizen petitions, while Arizona's measure was put there by the Republican Legislature. Arizona already bars transgender students who say they are girls from girls' school teams, and Arizona's Proposition 318 would go further by banning student athletes from using restrooms, locker rooms and showers that do not match their sex at birth. It would also extend those rules to private schools and club sports.
The same strategy is being used in Alabama for a different fight. Voters there will be asked whether the state constitution should be changed to require public schools to allow student-led prayer at the start of the day, and to put the daily Pledge of Allegiance into the constitution as well. State law already requires the pledge, students could not be forced into the prayer, and they would be able to opt out of the pledge.
The Alabama measure carries its own history. The Supreme Court struck down an Alabama statute in Wallace v. Jaffree in 1985, when the law at issue authorized a moment of silence for meditation or voluntary prayer. That makes the new proposal more than a symbolic gesture; it is an effort to write into the constitution a school-prayer rule that would be much harder for lawmakers to touch later.
Steven P. Brown, who raised questions about school oversight in the debate, pointed to the practical limits schools would face. “What is the oversight power of the school in something like this?” he asked, adding, “If you have a kid who stands up and wants to give a prayer to Satan, there is no question the school is going to step in.”
Those fights are arriving alongside a larger burst of education politics. This year has brought a total of 19 ballot initiatives related to K-12 and higher education, the most since the midterms in 2018. That matters because constitutional amendments and voter-approved statutes do not sit on the same shelf: once the language is written into a constitution, legislators cannot simply vote it away with the next session, which is exactly why activists are choosing the ballot over the committee room.
The unresolved question is not whether these measures will be debated; they already are. It is whether voters will use the 2026 midterm season to freeze these school fights into place, turning temporary political victories into rules that will be much harder to unwind in Nebraska, Washington, Colorado, Arizona and Alabama.
