Probably won’t mean much to many, but today is a reminder of how fast time does, indeed, fly.
It was 25 years ago today, a quarter of a century, that I wrote the simple request to have staff training on the existence and the needs of GLBT students and parents in the Oklahoma City Public School District with a lot of supporting information to show this was necessary and a suggested syllabus for such sessions and received the reply the next day, which meant no consideration was actually given to the request, because, although it would be an important thing and a necessary one as well, “Local norms will not allow it”.
The local norms at the time were determined by the Southern Baptist Church, extremely conservative politicians, and people’s propensity to accept falsehoods over facts, often in the name of Jesus.
In spite of its own admission that such professional development was important, the district was content to let the GLBT kids deal with things on their own and just get through the discrimination-based system to keep politicians and religious leaders happy, when the school district’ s responsibility was to education and welfare of the students. All of them.
The process took 12 years with administrators going through a revolving door of new people replacing the old, having to start over with each new superintendent, and there were many, and elected school board members with the bigoted reluctance to do what was best for the students now and in the future in favor of keeping the old guard, the church leaders and politicians, the ones who generally resented desegregation, happy. They were going to be allowed to mistreat this one group of students because laws had taken away their other bully victims.
It has now been 13 years since the policies of the Oklahoma City Public Schools added “Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity”, and the predicted end of society is yet to come about, and life has moved on now for those twelve years pretty much unscathed.
The predicted conga line of nuisance lawsuits motivated by the lawsuit frenzy of those who saw a cash cow and looked for things to file suits about did not happen. Students are protected, but they aren’t being stupid about it.
Schools did not become overrun with gangs of militant homosexuals attempting to tear down school traditions while demanding some form of supremacy.
Neither the students nor their parents yelled at school board meetings to establish their control over the curriculum as people seem to find acceptable now on other issues.
No one has shoved anything into anyone’s face or rubbed their noses in it.
Schools continue as usual but with the added feature that GLBT kids knew they were protected and those who would not have done so otherwise reduced their bullying because they knew that too.
12 years to get, 13 years in existence, and 25 years in the meantime.
Considering the protections were added in December 2009 and that year applied just to the second semester of the 2009/2010 academic year, the GLBT students who entered the first grade in the fall of 2010, and will be graduating this June from the Oklahoma City Schools, will be the first class to have gone through their complete school experience from grade one through twelve with “Sexual Orientation” and “Gender Identity” protection the whole time not only in that city, but the state.
They are unknown history makers.
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