NJ Supreme Court to Hear Gay Student Abuse Case

I wish that this was the issue that gay folks had latched onto rather than gay marriage.  Although I support gay marriage, and think it will do wonders for helping gay people, I think this is a more important issue. Gay youth have higher rates of suicide and depression that non-Gay youth, and from what the article describes below, it's not hard to understand why.

I think many teachers and administrators allow this to go on because they are uncomfortable bringing up sexuality in the classroom or they are providing a tacit support for bullies. From what friends tell me, and my own (albeit dated) experience, saying something is "gay" or calling a student a "fag" is rarely, if ever, addressed by teachers.

Sadly it is taking lawsuits to encourage schools to address these issues. But at least they are being addressed. Bullying is bad enough at schools, but for gay kids it often seems like this kind of abuse is acceptable if it is inflicted on them. This reinforces the message that they are worth less than their peers and promotes the negative self images that contribute to self-injurious thoughts and actions.

Go NJ, yet another reason to live in the Garden State.

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from 365gay.com

The New Jersey Supreme Court has reserved judgment in a case seeking to determine whether public schools can be held accountable for permitting a hostile environment toward LGBT students. The Toms River Regional School District was appealing a ruling ordering it to pay $50,000 to a student who was repeatedly beaten by other students who perceived him to be gay. In December the court of appeals upheld a ruling by the state Division on Civil Rights that students must receive the same protections from bias as people in the workplace. The school district's lawyer said children and schools cannot be held to the same standards as workplaces and employers. "The rules are entirely different for the workplace than they are for schools," attorney Thomas E. Monahan told the court. "We can't just fire a student. It's rare that a student gets expelled."

But Deputy Attorney General James R. Michael argued that the district could have done more to stop the harassment. "They didn't do enough, given the circumstance and information, to properly address the problem," he said. The case, which dates to 1999, involved a student identified only as L.W., who was perceived to be gay and harassed and assaulted by classmates beginning when he was in the fourth grade. The harassment got so bad, the boy at one point refused to go to school the following year, although he finally did, according to the New Jersey branch of the ACLU which represented him.

"You're a dancer, you're gay, you're a faggot, you don't belong in our school, get out," read a note inserted into his school locker. The boy's mother complained to school officials, and Irene Benn, an assistant principal at Toms River Intermediate West, identified some of the children responsible, telling them on more than one occasion that their behavior was inappropriate and giving detention to one of them, the opinion said.

The boy was harassed twice when he attended Toms River South High School, and the students involved in those incidents were suspended from school, even though the confrontations occurred off-campus.

After his mother filed a complaint, the Division on Civil Rights found that even though the boy had been subjected to bias-based harassment by at least 18 students in a four-month period, the school district failed to put the school on notice that such behavior was unacceptable, even though it dealt with each of the individual offenders. The district was ordered to reprint its student handbooks so that they explicitly ban bullying on the basis of sexual orientation. It also was ordered to annually train staffers - as well as middle and high-school students - in those policies for at least the next six years.