Anti-gay bullying to be addressed
CHAMPAIGN – A Safe Schools forum next week will look at bullying of gay students in schools and how teachers and administrators can respond.
State Superintendent Christopher Koch will be part of the forum.
It will be held from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Monday at the Parkland College Theater, 2400 W. Bradley Ave., C.
It is sponsored by several organizations, including the East Central Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union of Champaign County, the Urbana High School Social Justice Committee and the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Urbana-Champaign.
According to research done in Illinois, bullying based on sexual orientation or gender identity "is one of the most common forms of bullying and is second only to bullying based on appearance," said Sarah Schriber, policy director for the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, a statewide organization that promotes the safety and support of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) young people.
"Even if schools do anti-bullying work, it rarely discusses this type of bullying, even though it's so prevalent.
"It's really important that we realize that (anti-gay bullying) is going on in every school in the area, in urban areas and in rural areas, and really everywhere in Illinois and across the country," Schriber said.
The forum's panel includes four current or former area students, a teacher, a parent, Urbana High School Principal Laura Taylor, a school district lawyer and a University of Illinois professor who does research in the area of anti-gay harassment in the schools.
One of the panelists is Janelle O'Dea, a Parkland College student who graduated from Mahomet-Seymour High School last spring. O'Dea became involved in the issue after seeing some of her friends harassed in high school.
"I had gay friends who I saw being affected by all the comments people would throw around – 'That's so gay' or 'He's a faggot,'" she said. "They would feel inferior, that they couldn't be themselves or couldn't speak up."
Other students rarely spoke up in their defense, O'Dea said, for fear of being harassed themselves.
"You were pretty much asking for people to start bullying you and start giving you a hard time," she said.
"It became a distraction for me."
Teachers and school administrators are legally and ethically obligated to provide a safe environment for their students, say the educators involved in the forum. And one of the most effective ways to make school environments safer for LGBT students is through professional development, said Schriber, but few districts require such training.
"We are often called to do professional development when there's a crisis," Schriber said of her organization. "I'm glad we get called when there's a crisis, but we'd much rather do it proactively."
Stacey Gross, an art teacher at Champaign's Centennial High School and one of the forum's panelists, has offered a class to school district staff about harassment of LGBT students and how to deal with it.
Centennial school psychologist Ondine Gross, who will moderate the forum, has offered similar training to the district's social workers and psychologists that addresses issues for both students who are gay and those with gay parents.
But, they say, such training varies from building to building and only reaches a small portion of the district's staff.
At Urbana High School, Taylor created a social justice committee as a school improvement initiative a few years ago, to mitigate the effects of poverty, racial stereotypes, gender identity and sexual orientation, and language that can negatively affect student achievement.
The committee made an anti-discrimination video that all teachers have seen, and Taylor has talked at faculty meetings about how teachers should react to anti-gay language in the school.
Taylor said the school's climate has improved greatly for all students in the past three years, and she believes LGBT students are accepted by other students, although she still hears some anti-gay language in the hallways.
"Because there has been such an emphasis on not using discriminatory language of any kind in the building. ... I have found that there is some peer pressure to do the right thing and not make derogatory statements," Taylor said in an e-mail.
Stacey Gross and Ondine Gross believe the climate at Centennial for gay students has improved since students started a gay-straight alliance six years ago.
The two are co-sponsors of the organization.
Its goal, Ondine Gross said, is not just to support students identifying themselves as gay. It's also to create a community that doesn't tolerate harassment of those students.
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