Dear Safe Schools Coalition Members and Friends:

(1) “Gay Student Teacher Fired for Saying He Wanted to Marry a Man?”
(2) “How to make schools safer for gay students”(3) “When will the homophobic bullying cease?”

(4) “Fed grants awarded to begin addressing bullying and safe schools”

(5) “Exodus Abandons Anti-Gay School Campaign”

(6) “Does It Get Better and If So, For Who?”

(7) “A Historic Federal Grant to Help LGBT Foster Youth”

(8) “Adults bear responsibility to protect all young people”

***************************************

(1) “Gay Student Teacher Fired for Saying He Wanted to Marry a Man?”
http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/gay_student_teacher_fired_for_saying_he_wanted_to_marry_a_man?me=nl

Many of us have had student teachers, those juniors and seniors in college who step into elementary school, middle school and high school classrooms to get some 'on-the-job' training. For anyone getting their degree in education, student teaching is practically a requirement; a time to put what you learned in the classroom into practice.

But for at least one Oregon college student, the student teaching process seemed to be a reminder that in some school districts, it's still not OK to acknowledge the existence of LGBT people.

Head on over to Beaverton School District, in the suburbs of Portland. There, Seth Stambaugh, a 23-year-old graduate teaching student at Lewis and Clark College, was told by school district administrators that he was no longer allowed to student teach in the district. They told him he had made "inappropriate" comments, and that he would have to find another school district to student teach in.

You may read the rest of this blog here: http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/gay_student_teacher_fired_for_saying_he_wanted_to_marry_a_man?me=nl

(2) “How to make schools safer for gay students”

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/college-life/how-to-make-schools-safer-for.html

The past several weeks have seen the suicides of at least four American teenage students (two just 13 years old) who were harassed and bullied because they were, or were thought to be, gay. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students face a unique set of safety concerns each day. Over 85% report being harassed because of their sexual or gender identity, and over 20% report being physically attacked. The suicide rate for LGBT students continues to be 3-4 times higher than that of their straight counterparts.

School environments can be truly dangerous, and tragedies like those we’ve witnessed over the past month have become painfully foreseeable. Until school environments are made safe for LGBT students, we will predictably see a new series of suicides each fall as tormented students return to school and to their bullies.

That’s why the National Education Policy Center and its partners asked two experts to come up with clear policy recommendations to address these safety concerns.

The result is a policy brief and model code language released this past week at an event held at the National Education Association (NEA) headquarters in Washington DC: Safe at School: Addressing the School Environment and LGBT Safety through Policy and Legislation, written by Stuart Biegel and Sheila James Kuehl, and co-sponsored by the UCLA Williams Institute and with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

The policy brief explains the research about school safety, offers concrete recommendations that follow from the research, and then presents model statutory code language that implements the recommendations and that can be adopted by state legislators wanting to address these safety issues.

Professor Biegel said something to me that I included in our press release and that is worth repeating here: “In this area, educators are not required to change their personal values or religious beliefs. However, all students must be treated with equal dignity and equal respect by school officials, both under the law and as a matter of morality and common decency.”

Below, I summarize the brief, but I hope readers will click through and read the whole thing. It’s available online at http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/safe-at-school.

To read the rest of this editorial, please visit this link:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/college-life/how-to-make-schools-safer-for.html

(3) “When will the homophobic bullying cease?”

http://www.irenemonroe.com/2010/10/06/when-will-the-homophobic-bullying-cease/

When Sirdeaner L. Walker of Springfield spoke at a press conference in Massachusetts last year calling for effective and comprehensive anti-bullying legislation to be passed in response to the tragic loss of her 11-year-old-son, Carl, I had hoped I would neither read nor hear ever again about another child or young adult committing suicide as the result of bullying.

But the rise of “bullicide” has become a national epidemic, where anti-gay bullying, just in the month of September, resulted in nine suicides because of teenagers’ sexual orientation or gender expression, highlighting the disproportionate bullying of our LGBTQ kids (or those perceived to be).

One of the suicides this past September was that of 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi. Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after finding out that his college roommate and another classmate used a webcam to secretly broadcast his sexual encounters with another male, highlighting the dangers of “cyberbullying” — teasing, harassing, or intimidating with pictures or words distributed online or via text message.

Ms. Walker found her son, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hanging by an extension cord on the second floor of their home after he endured endless anti-gay and homophobic taunts by schoolmates, although Carl never identified as gay.

When I went to speak last year at the Anti-Bullying Community Forum and Vigil in reference to Carl’s death some kids in the black community of Springfield I spoke with about the incident said Carl’s gender expression was queer, implying that there existed sufficient rationale to taunt him.

You can read the rest of this blog post here:

http://www.irenemonroe.com/2010/10/06/when-will-the-homophobic-bullying-cease/

(4) “Fed grants awarded to begin addressing bullying and safe schools”

http://www.keennewsservice.com/2010/10/05/fed-grants-awarded-to-begin-addressing-bullying-and-safe-schools/

The U.S. Department of Education announced today (Oct. 5) the awarding of $38.8 million in grants to 11 states from a new Safe and Supportive School program. The timing comes just days after a media blitz about the suicides of five teenagers, at least four of whom were bullied for being gay or being perceived as gay. But anybody who knows Washington knows Tuesday’s grants weren’t made in reaction to the recent news.

“It would be inaccurate to say we’re doing this as a response to recent events,” said Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools (OSDFS) at the U.S. Department of Education.

Jennings, the nation’s top official for promoting safe schools, said the latest string of teen suicides driven by anti-gay bullying is, sadly, not a new trend.

“The problem of greater rates of suicide among LGBT youth being linked to school bullying is something that has been documented and known for a very long time,” said Jennings.

Jennings has some experience in the matter. As a teenager, he himself attempted suicide and had been the subject of relentless bullying in middle school and early high school. He founded the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990 to help promote safe and respectful climates for LGBT youth in schools. And the week in April 2009 when the Obama administration offered him the position as head of OSDFS, news broke about the bullying-related suicide of 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover of Springfield, Massachusetts, who had been the subject of anti-gay taunts. That news, he said, inspired him to take the job.

You can read the rest of this article at:

http://www.keennewsservice.com/2010/10/05/fed-grants-awarded-to-begin-addressing-bullying-and-safe-schools/

(5) “Exodus Abandons Anti-Gay School Campaign”

http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/2010/10/exodus-abandons-anti-gay-school-campaign/

In the wake of four student suicides egged on by homophobic bullying, Exodus Global Alliance has abandoned an anti-gay school program dubbed the Day of Truth.

Since 2005, The Day of Truth took place every year in schools across North America—strategically scheduled to occur one day after the Day of Silence, an anti-bullying campaign designed to draw attention to how gay students must live in silence and fear to avoid harassment. “I’m speaking the truth to break the silence,” Exodus’ pamphelts read, “Exodus network is mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality.” (Emphasis theirs.)

While Exodus took over the campaign in 2009, it was originally started by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian-funded legal group who unsuccessfully brought a school to court for suspending a student who wore a disruptive T-Shirt. “Be Ashamed,” it said. “Homosexuality is Shameful.”

It’s not surprising that Exodus wanted to take over the campaign so eagerly; it meshes with their mission perfectly. Exodus’ whole purpose is to promote the idea that gay people are morally corrupt, but can change through prayer and reparative therapy—a notion flatly rejected by all medical and psychological associations. Schools were also beginning to actively reject this message, having seen first-hand the dire harm that suppression and silence does to gay students.

As programs like the Day of Silence grew in popularity, Exodus felt more and more undermined by their effectiveness. Threatened, they lept at the opportunity to bring their unscientific message to schools, providing materials and instruction to schools across the continent. Their efforts immediately enabled bullies with anti-gay slogans and provided adult permission to spread messages of intolerance and shame, adding to the oppression and silence that gays already felt every day. It carefully nurtured the environment in which gay students felt so ashamed and hopeless that some would resort to suicide.

For the rest of this story, visit: http://gayrights.change.org/blog/view/dan_savage_tells_lgbt_kids_that_life_gets_better

(6) “Does It Get Better and If So, For Who?”

http://www.southernersonnewground.org/2010/10/does-it-get-better-and-for-who/

In any community, when young people are killing themselves, we have no choice but to look hard at what realities they are living, get real smart about how we approach them, and then fight for them and with them. Only truly seeing the realities of our young people can help us begin to make whole the generational fabric of our communities, from elders to children, who have been cut away from each other by oppression. SONG knows that the recent 6 reported suicides of youth linked to homophobia and bullying are only representative of a deep and brutal gap between how we are told ‘we are treated’ as LGBTQ people, and how we know we are. We are told by straight people and often by privileged LGBTQ people that the conditions we live through and with in our families, places of worship, work places, streets, and communities are “not that bad”, or that “we make it worse” by being out. If we have moments of internalized homophobia where we doubt ourselves, doubt our own eyes, ears, hearts and realities—these events must serve as a reminder that we do not have the luxury to confuse being strong with allowing our life realities to be downplayed. Too often we believe that our realities will lessen if we deny them; when in fact the opposite is true—when we say the harm that comes to us mentally and emotionally is somehow ‘less real’ we minimize it and remain complicit in it. Physical harm is its own creature; it is different and horribly concrete and real. But, it is not the only form of harm.

To read the rest of this blog, please click here: http://www.southernersonnewground.org/2010/10/does-it-get-better-and-for-who/

(7) “A Historic Federal Grant to Help LGBT Foster Youth”

http://transgenderequality.wordpress.com/2010/10/08/a-historic-federal-grant-to-help-lgbt-foster-youth/

The Department of Health and Human Services has awarded a $13.3 million competitive federal grant to a coalition of groups, led by the LA Gay & Lesbian Center, to develop a model program for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth in foster care. NCTE applauds this historic grant award and the LA Gay & Lesbian Center, PFLAG and the nearly 20 other organizations who will be undertaking this important project.

This is big news, not only because it is the largest ever federal grant for an LGBT-focused project, but because LGBT foster youth are in such dire need of caring and supportive homes and services. It is by now well documented that LGBT youth are disproportionately in out of home care, and that these youth face high levels hostility, discrimination and abuse in care. In addition, transgender foster youth struggle daily with their very identities being disregarded. While the Child Welfare League of America has worked hard together with LGBT advocates to educate providers and promote best practices, the difficulties faced by LGBT foster youth remain pervasive. With the support of the federal government, this model project could lead the way for agencies and providers around the country who are responsible for the safety and well-being of LGBT youth.

(8) “Adults bear responsibility to protect all young people”

http://blogs.tennessean.com/opinion/2010/10/07/adults-bear-responsibility-to-protect-all-young-people/

I know that many of my friends, colleagues and fellow Nashvillians share in my sadness with the recent report of yet another young gay man taking his life because of fear, abuse and bullying. There have been four senseless deaths in the past month and they are happening all over our country — California, Texas, Indiana and New Jersey.

It appears that the South doesn’t have the exclusive market on bigotry and hate, but it does make me wonder just how many lives have been lost in Tennessee that were never reported. How many parents have lost children to suicide and were unaware of the suffering of their children and never connected their child’s death to their struggle with sexual orientation or gender identity?

I lose sleep at night — my mind spinning with the urgency of the issues that face our young people. I’m terrified that I will wake to the morning news and hear the words “Gay Teen Commits Suicide in Nashville.” Bullying is real and universal — the targets are placed on the heads of any one who is perceived as being “different.” But when it comes to bullying based on perceived sexual orientation or gender identity, it becomes an act of hate that manifests into a crisis that young people are just not equipped to handle. They are not equipped to handle this crisis because the adults who are present in their lives are not standing up for them or speaking out for them.

Words are powerful. We can bring people away from the edge of disaster with our words or push them to their tipping point, with tragic results.

To read the rest of this blog, please click here:

http://blogs.tennessean.com/opinion/2010/10/07/adults-bear-responsibility-to-protect-all-young-people/