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.

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.