Unsafe Schools Program?

Martha Swindler, the gay/straight alliance (GSA) advisor at Barnstable High School, said for many students at her school being out or visibly LGBT means being a moving target.

For instance, one female student, a lesbian, told Swindler she was walking recently to pick up her sibling at the nearby middle school when someone drove by and threw a mostly empty vodka bottle with a lit match inside it, in the style of a Molotov cocktail, at her. A male student who wears fishnet stockings has been repeatedly pushed, shoved, and called derogatory names by other students. LGBT students at the school have had their artwork defaced. Swindler said she has a handful of students in her GSA who transferred into Barnstable High for their senior year; they had opted to go to a nearby charter school for their first three years because it was seen as a safer place for LGBT students and other students pegged by their peers as "different." All of her students complain about the constant use of the word "fag" by their peers.

But Swindler also said that in her nine years as GSA advisor the school climate has improved. There have been fewer violent incidents, and students have grown more comfortable reporting anti-LGBT harassment to faculty and staff and knowing that they will take action.

"I think it got better, and it has plateaued, I am sad to say. It went through a phase when it was really bad. When we started the GSA right before I got here kids were getting beaten up. ... I think it's gotten better, for sure, but I think it has plateaued," said Swindler.

Alex Morse, who graduated from Holyoke High School last year and just finished his first year at Brown University, said that he founded his school's GSA largely in response to the constant stream of anti-gay slurs and language used by his peers. Often he said teachers would ignore the use of anti-gay language, even when it took place in their classrooms.

"I was a sophomore when I came out, and it was also the time around when I started the GSA, and before the GSA got established homophobic language was really rampant in the hallways and the classrooms," said Morse, a member of the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth.

While Morse faced little overt harassment after coming out, some of his friends weren't so lucky. One friend in the GSA endured regular anti-gay taunts in the locker room, and students refused to change in his presence. Another student became a regular target in the cafeteria, where students would flip over his tray to humiliate him. Morse, who is white, said that youth of color and students seen as effeminate bore the brunt of the harassment, but the constant anti-gay slurs took their toll on all students.

"People tell these stories [of harassment], and you can tell it's something that hurts them, and it's a distraction. ... You have to think, are people talking about you when they're laughing in the back of class?" said Morse. "LGBT students often have to develop coping mechanisms to overcome the forms of harassment they receive in school."

Survey says: things not getting better
Morse and Swindler's experiences are borne out in the latest results of the state Department of Primary and Secondary Education's (DESE) Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), which the state conducts every two years to measure the health and safety risks of high schoolers across Massachusetts. The 2007 YRBS raised red flags among LGBT youth advocates for showing an apparent increase in the percentage of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) youth who have been injured or threatened with a weapon at school, who have attempted suicide in the past year, and who have required medical attention as a result of a suicide attempt. It showed that LGB youth continued to face all of those risks at much higher levels than their straight peers, and they were also more likely to have been injured in a physical fight and to have skipped school because of feeling unsafe. The survey provides no information about the risks facing transgender youth [see "YRBS unlikely to include trans youth in '09, page 13].

JC Considine, spokesman for DESE, cautioned that due to the sample size (the 2007 YRBS surveyed about 3100 students, and only about five percent of those identified as LGB) the numbers showing an increase in health and safety risks for LGB youth are not conclusive.

"None of the 2005 to 2007 changes among self-identified gay, lesbian, bisexual students are statistically significant. The sample sizes are very small, so even changes that might look dramatically different from year to year are in fact often not statistically significant," said Considine in an e-mail to Bay Windows.

What the numbers do show without a doubt, Considine said, is that LGB youth continue to face greater threats to their health and safety than their straight peers. The most alarming statistic shows that while LGB youth in 2005 were nearly twice as likely as straight students to report being threatened or injured with a weapon in school, in 2007 they were over four times as likely to do so.

Youth advocates say the take-home message from the latest YRBS is that, even if the numbers are too small to conclude that things are getting worse, at the very least they are not getting better. Since 1997, the first year for which the YRBS provided information about LGB youth, the survey has shown that the disparity between LGB youth and straight youth has remained relatively constant, with LGB youth being two to four times more likely than straight students to face risks such as suicide attempts, threats with a weapon, and harassment that prompts them to skip school. Stanley Griffith, president of the board of Greater Boston PFLAG, said he found the 2007 YRBS numbers alarming.

"I've been distressed since I saw those numbers because I had some optimism that things might be getting better," said Griffith.

Jeff Perrotti, founding director of state's Safe Schools program in 1993 and currently a consultant with DESE working on school climate issues in technical and vocational education settings, said that regardless of whether the 2007 numbers are worse than the 2005 numbers, neither set is good news for LGBT youth.

"Either set of numbers are still horrendous, and really show there's still a lot more work that needs to be done. ... The numbers aren't going in the direction we'd like to see them going," said Perrotti.

Anti-gay harassment goes retro
As for the reasons behind the continued disparities, the LGBT youth advocates who spoke to Bay Windows pointed to a number of factors, from lack of funding for state LGBT youth programming to blowback from the same-sex marriage debates to a lack of support for youth issues by the broader LGBT community. Chief among the culprits was the drastic cut in state LGBT youth programming that began in 2002, bringing total funding down from $1.6 million to the current level of $550,000. Perrotti, who served as director of Safe Schools programs at DESE (then known as the Department of Education) for its first two years, said the cuts meant that programs that were central to supporting LGBT students and changing the climate in the schools got the axe. The greatest loss came in the form of staff cuts. Perrotti said at the program's peak Safe Schools had four fulltime staff and several consultants working with schools throughout the state to provide trainings for teachers and support for GSAs.

Considine said DESE currently has no full-time or part-time staff for its Safe Schools program, and there have been no trainings this year. The program hired a consultant to provide some technical support to schools last year. DESE tried on two separate occasions to hire someone to staff Safe Schools, said Considine, but did not find any suitable candidates; if there is sufficient funding in the next fiscal year budget Considine said DESE will make hiring Safe Schools staff a priority.

Perrotti said the lack of fulltime staff has meant that fewer students and teachers know about resources to keep their GSAs running, particularly the Safe Schools mini-grants, which provide funding for starting and maintaining GSAs. When Safe Schools announced its grant program for Fiscal Year 2008, initially only 23 schools across the state applied, about half as many as the year before. DESE held a second round of grants and successfully brought up their numbers, but the initial failure to attract grantees showed the consequences of running Safe Schools without any staff.

"I think we need at least one or more fulltime employees that are responsible for the program. ... Schools just don't apply [for grants] because they're out there," said Perrotti.

Scott Fitzmaurice, executive director of the Cape and Islands Gay and Straight Youth Alliance (CIGSYA) in Barnstable, said without regular teacher trainings the groundwork laid by the Safe Schools program in its early years is unraveling. He said CIGSYA youth tell him that teachers in their schools do not discipline students who use anti-gay slurs, and in some instance the teachers themselves make anti-gay comments. He said one youth complained that a teacher told a student he had a "faggy walk."

"[The trainings] give the school the tools and capacity to be able not only to respond, but to be proactive [in addressing anti-gay harassment], to say, this is the environment we expect here," said Fitzmaurice. "But when it's an ignored issue and all of the students and educators get a barrage of media every day that gay is wrong and trans is wrong, I can't tell you the number of comments I have heard in the past year that I would hope a student would never say, and it came from teachers. ... I haven't heard that stuff since 1995, 1996."

Fitzmaurice believes DESE needs to refocus on LGBT youth issues.

"It's some of the most important work in the state, and it's a travesty that they haven't been on the map for several years. ... I think some of the folks at [DESE] need to look at their vision and see why it's not part of it. If it is, I'm not seeing it."

Jason Smith, chair of the Massachusetts Commission on GLBT Youth, said that while repairing the infrastructure for Safe Schools is an important component to fixing the problem, he believes the state must take a broader look at the issues affecting LGBT youth in a range of settings. He said fixing Safe Schools would not solve the threats LGBT youth face to their health and safety within their communities, their families, and the other settings where they find themselves. "It's kind of a band aid to a more comprehensive problem," said Smith.

Morse said at Holyoke High the students in the GSA took matters into their own hands to change the school climate. They worked with school officials to hold a mandatory school assembly on LGBT issues, and during the assembly discussed the impact that anti-gay language has on LGBT students.

"I think we got that point through," said Morse.

He said the GSA also organized its own teacher trainings, and during the sessions students gave teachers their firsthand perspectives of how it feels to be LGBT and to hear students make anti-gay comments in the classroom and in the halls.

Perrotti said raising visibility within the schools is another important tactic to continue to improve the climate for LGBT students. During the early days of the Safe Schools program staff would work to get LGBT-friendly "safe zone" stickers and pro-LGBT posters into the hands of teachers around the state, but much of that work has fallen by the wayside. In Perrotti's own work with vocational programs, which does not fall under Safe Schools, he has worked with design students to create new LGBT-oriented diversity posters and has distributed them to schools at conferences. He said those materials send the message to students that their teachers and administrators are LGBT friendly, and they are a core component in the effort to change the climate in schools.

"We definitely saw a difference. One of the first requests schools would always make [in the early years of Safe Schools] was, can you get us safe zone stickers, posters?" said Perrotti.

Smith said the LGBT community as a whole also needs to think about "the numbers [from the YRBS] and its responsibility to GLBT youth."

"I think the community can step in helping to fund the infrastructure, participating with these organizations, mentoring, and simply demanding that their state officials pay attention to the issue," said Smith.