...and again, my whole point is that you aren't engaging with what the policy actually says/does, but starting and stopping with whose administration it was created under and rolled back to under.

I also notice you keep focusing on K12, despite a majority of these cases being college cases. Both the stakes of being wrongly found responsible and the likelihood anyone involved has a lawyer for the Title IX hearing are much lower for K12 cases. Unless the kid is accusing staff or faculty, in which case I definitely expect the kid's parents to have a lawyer present at the very least, but that's because there are much more likely to be criminal or civil cases in that case in addition to the Title IX case as opposed to cases involving two kids where it's probably just the Title IX hearing.

It really isn't specifically designed to silence them though. Part of the whole construct is specifically that any questioning of their testimony has to be approved by the finder of fact (aka analog to a judge, since the DeVos process is modeled in a lot of ways on a bench trial - typically this is the Title IX Coordinator, but it can be delegated) as being relevant to the case - the whole point of which is to bar questions that are just irrelevant victim blaming / victim shaming from being asked (for example, the sex life of the accuser is usually irrelevant, as is what she was wearing). The accused is also not allowed to ask questions directly, it must go through an intermediate (typically either lawyer for the accused or appointed faculty advisor), specifically to make it less intimidating.