(Originally published in Bay Windows, June 28, 2007.)
Is your child’s school inclusive of LGBT families? If not, how can you improve it? Jennifer Chrisler, Executive Director of the Family Pride Coalition, recently spoke with me about their new interactive tool that helps parents answer these critical questions.
What is the Rainbow Report Card (RRC)?
The RRC is an online tool for parents and other folks interested in how schools are doing in regards to creating a welcoming environment for children who have one or more LGBT parents. It’s a way to get a customized set of guidelines and recommendations very specific to your school community that will allow you to reward the policies that are going really well and make positive change in those areas where work still needs to be done.
Why did you create an interactive tool instead of static information?
One of the things we realized is that each school and school community is very individualized. It was really important to us to create a customizable tool for parents and other folks who want to measure the environment. One of the great ways to do that is to use the power of technology. This gives folks a way to get very specific recommendations and specific answers about the school they want to assess, and individuals can come back over time and update their responses to these questions and see how they’re moving the progress forward.
Are you aiming it at any particular grade range?
No. The first release of the RRC is meant to be very general so it can be applied to elementary, middle, and high school populations. Our hope is over time that we can develop report cards that speak to each of the different major school levels. because obviously there are some differences in those different school environments.
What other future features will it have?
The RRC is still a beta version, which means there are some ongoing things we want to continue to tweak and analyze. The reason for launching the first version now is because we are in end-of-year report-card season. We thought that the same way students get assessed at the end of the year, it’s equally appropriate to assess the school community then. Other features we’ll be exploring are: Can we do things that are specific to each major educational level? Are there additional things we want to be able to measure in the school community? One of the things we also really enjoy is getting feedback from our members and those we work with, so we’re hoping to incorporate that conversation into the next iteration of the RRC.
What kind of advice might a parent receive?
There are different strategies depending on the answers you input into the RRC. There is guidance around how to create policy— non-discrimination policies that impact our kids and the teachers in that community and the administrators and workers in the school. There’s actually specific language that parents can take, steps about who to contact to get the basic information, what to do once you have the information, and how to effectuate change if there needs to be change. There are step-by-step suggestions about how to make sure there are more books in the classroom and the library that represent diverse family structures. Even if there are those books in the classroom, there are guidelines and suggestions about how to make sure they get used, for example, going and doing a guest reading or working with the school librarian to develop a set of recommended readings if people ask for information about the topic. It really spans a wide variety of ways to effectuate change. It’s a great tool because it’s very customized to the individual school that you’ll be evaluating.
What about parents whose children are just starting school?
Anytime as a parent that you’re first entering into a school environment there are some basic things you can do to get informed. There will be a separate document as part of the RRC for folks who are just starting to understand what all these issues are—a basic primer for them to get up to speed on the kinds of things they’re going to need to know and address.
The basics are: You want to meet with both the administration and the teacher your child will be having to have an initial conversation about: how is my child going to be treated, what can I expect, what does the curriculum look like? Do families get talked about at all? If they do, how do you deal with families that don’t fit the traditional mom-dad structure? They can sit down with the principal or the assistant principal and ask to see a copy of the handbooks, ask to see what the forms look like. Usually schools, if they’ve made some of the basic progress forward, will have things that say “parent-parent/guardian-guardian,” and basic information about how it’s a welcoming school environment for anybody and everybody who attends in that community.
I definitely think if you’re just getting started, the most important thing you can do is begin a conversation. At the end of the day, so much of this is about engaging folks in a conversation about what our families are about, about who our children are, about what our lives are about, just to get them to understand that we’re very much the same and we’re a little bit different.
Interact with the Rainbow Report Card at: http://www.familypride.org/reportcard/