Today marks the 12th annual Day of Silence, an event where students from middle school to college are asked “to take some form of a vow of silence to bring attention to the name-calling, bullying and harassment—in effect, the silencing—experienced by LGBT students and their allies.” This year’s event is in memory of Lawrence King,
School administrators in Bristol, England have removed the books King & King and And Tango Makes Three, and the DVD That’s a Family from two primary schools. Some parents complained that they should have been consulted before LGBT-inclusive materials were used in the classroom. The schools had introduced the books in order to comply with
I rarely pass along a press release wholesale, but this one from COLAGE, about scholarships for children of LGBTQ families, seemed worthy: Sponsored by COLAGE with generous support from the Horizons Foundation Joseph Towner Fund COLAGE is pleased to announce a continued partnership with Horizons Foundation to award four $1,000 scholarships to support the undergraduate
“Gay” is the number-one insult among schoolchildren, reports the BBC, although most use it to mean “lame,” without any intended reference to sexual orientation. The article charts how the meaning of the word has changed over the years (remember when it used to mean “happy” or “festive”?), and notes “This mutation of the word is
Looks like the Loudoun County, Virginia school superintendent’s backpedaling over And Tango Makes Three was in the right direction. According to the Washington Post: On Monday, school officials issued a written statement saying that the book also would return to the shelves at Sugarland [Elementary School] because [Superintendent] Hatrick had discovered “significant procedural errors” in
The gay-straight alliance at one of the high schools in our area was sponsoring a showing of Love Makes a Family, the great traveling exhibit of photographs and interviews featuring LGBT families. Yesterday, the exhibit was open to the public. Even though I’d seen it before, I took my son after preschool.
The first comprehensive report on LGBT families’ experiences in education, Involved, Invisible, Ignored, has found that LGBT parents are more likely to be involved in their children’s K-12 education than the general parent population. At the same time, both LGBT parents and their children often report harassment because of their family structure. The report was
After 15-year-old Lawrence King was shot to death by a fellow student because he was gay, California Assemblyman Mike Eng proposed a new bill to “establish school diversity and sensitivity training to help prevent such tragedies in the future.” According to Gay Wired, “The new bill would require mandatory classes on diversity and tolerance in
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Thursday unanimously upheld the rejection of a suit brought by two couples from Lexington, Massachusetts, who said their school district had no right to include LGBT-related books like King & King in its elementary school curriculum. (See my August post about the case.) The parents
Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper for the U.S. military community overseas, has a fascinating article on the establishment of a Gay-Straight Alliance club at Robert D. Edgren High School, situated at Misawa Air Base in Japan and part of the Department of Defense Dependents Schools-Pacific. Despite some controversy and an investigation of the Department
