Tomorrow is an important anniversary, and I thought I would pass on a story related to it.
During the years of advocacy to have the Oklahoma City Public Schools district (OKCPS) include “sexual orientation” in its policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination so that the welfare, safety, and school experience of GLBT students would be on par with their peers and not up to the personal, political, and religious beliefs of staff and other students.
People spoke to the School Board at many of its public meetings, summarizing reports with hard copies given to each member; along with giving them the rates of teen suicides, especially among GLBT teens and the reasons a teen might attempt to commit suicide with hard copies of the relevant statistics and reports given to each member; and legal cases, where school districts had paid dearly for their neglecting GLBT student safety in school, where injury or even death resulted from bullying while the district stood by complicit, were also presented with hard copies of newspaper articles and legal briefs given to each member.
But, the School Board remained deaf to pleas and blind to reality.
The central administration building of OKCPS was in a repurposed high school building with classrooms modified into offices and where the School Board held its public meetings in the remodeled school auditorium.
Those attending Board meetings sit in the auditorium seats facing the School Board dais located on the floor in front of the stage.
Hanging on the walls on either side of the dais were four pictures, two on each wall, that were large poster sized, colorful, and glossy images of children in various educational settings, all of them happy, all excited, and all in elementary and pre-school. Children, being like kittens, are playful, happy and innocent, and make for better subjects of such pictures than do middle and high school kids who, like the cats those kittens eventually grow into, lose that charming and photogenic innocence.
One of the people sitting in the audience at one meeting had counted the number of students in all four pictures, and found that there were ten, and when his time came to speak, he approached the podium and repeated the suicide rate of teens, emphasizing the rate among GLBT teens, and introduced the generally accepted belief that if ten percent of the general population was Gay, that would mean, statistically, that one of the children in the pictures was.
He directed the Board members to look at both pictures carefully, which they did.
After a pause, the gentleman asked the School Board members to pick the one out of the ten kids they would have no problem with it if he or she later attempted suicide or suffered some other harm, physical or mental, as a teen.
The Board was directed to pick the one they had no problem with dying at their own hands or those of others.”
Statistically, one of those children would.
While the members of the Board looked uncomfortable, he explained that there were kids in their schools today, cute or otherwise, like them or dissimilar, Gay or straight, and if they found it cringe-worthy to choose a child they can see, they should also find it cringe-worthy to be comfortable in allowing conditions they could control and make better to continue as is, while kids attempted suicide out of their sight and, not being in any Board related pictures, they were unknown,to them.
The people who run a school districts whose greatest responsibility is to do what they have the power to do to promote the education, safety, and well-being, both physical and mental, of all students in all ways, having the statistics, studies, and presentations from meetings delivered both verbally and in hard copy for a dozen years, and having accepted the position they have, must do what they know they should to fulfill that responsibility.
To not do that is to bear some, if not most, of the responsibility if a student under their care becomes a victim of harm whether by others or selves, and whether they are the present day students or those who once were, whose lives are forever affected by their school experience.
They needed to act.
“I remember somebody saying one time, ‘You can’t legislate love.’ I said, ‘No, you can’t, but you can legislate an atmosphere where love can happen.’ “
Victoria Gray Adams