Elementary Students Want Educational Website to Include LGBT Rights

When fourth and fifth graders at a New York City school saw that a major educational website wasn’t including LGBT rights in its coverage of civil rights issues, they decided to take action.

In the pointed yet entertaining video below, and on their website (Kids 4 LGBT Rights Now), students from The Earth School explain that last year, their class was studying various civil rights movements, including LGBT rights. They used several websites for their research, including BrainPOP, which provides resources on numerous topics across the curriculum, aligned to academic standards. One student noticed that BrainPOP had videos on several other civil rights movements, but not LGBT rights. She wrote an email to them asking why and requesting that they address this.

At first, the company said they’d pass the request along. Later, the students write, they received an e-mail from someone at the company saying they would, “[revise] the Civil Rights movie to better highlight the connection between the historical movement of the 1960s and the activism it inspired in subsequent generations. This will naturally include the LGBT Rights movement.”

The kids weren’t satisfied, wanting a standalone video on LGBT rights. The company spokesperson replied that according to her standards provider, “only four states, including New York, have specific standards around LGBT rights. Every one of those standards is at the high school level”—and BrainPOP does not create content specific to those grades.

The kids soon found the error in that:

We saw so many other videos on BrainPOP that we couldn’t imagine were mentioned in the state standards. Our teacher reviewed the social studies standards in all 50 states and not only found that LGBT history and civil rights were explicitly mentioned in both New York and California’s standards for 3rd-8th grade, but also found overwhelming support for studying movements that have preserved and expanded rights.

That teacher, Colin Schumacher, has detailed his findings here. He notes, wisely, that when asking, “Do the state standards support the inclusion of classroom content on LGBT history and civil rights?” we should remember that “A far more pressing question … is whether or not there is compelling rationale for excluding LGBT history and civil rights.”

Perhaps BrainPOP should reach out to Jerome Pohlen, author of the recent Gay and Lesbian History for Kids (which, despite the title, is actually inclusive of the full LGBT spectrum).

I love that their school is behind these students, featuring their video on its homepage (as of this writing). Watch the video, and take action to support these kids (and many kids, really, as BrainPOP is “used in more than 20 percent of U.S. schools,” and is “growing internationally,” according to its website).

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