Report: LGBT students still face discrimination at school
SIOUX FALLS, S.D.—Many public schools are still hostile environments for LGBT students, an international human rights organization concluded in a report released Wednesday.
The lengthy report from Human Rights Watch was based on interviews primarily with current and former high school students, parents, administrators and teachers in Alabama, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Utah. It documented several challenges lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender students face, including in-person and online bullying, limits on LGBT student groups, exclusion of some topics from curricula and discrimination by classmates and school personnel.
“In every state we visited, we heard stories of students who were insulted, cyber-bullied or attacked, and teachers who allowed discrimination and harassment because they see it as normal behavior,” said Ryan Thoreson, a fellow in the nonprofit’s LGBT Rights Program.
Thoreson said the five states provided a regionally representative and legally diverse sample.
Thirty-one states, including the five in the report, have not enacted laws to specifically protect against bullying on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, according to the report. While some districts and schools in Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah have worked on comprehensive bullying policies, administrators in South Dakota cannot because of a state law that prohibits school districts from naming any protected classes of students in such policies.
“This makes it much more difficult for teachers to know how to intervene when they see that bullying happening, (and) for students to know that’s off-limits, that’s not OK,” Thoreson said. “Only South Dakota and Missouri have laws … that prohibit school districts from putting their own protections.”
The report includes policy recommendations at the state level to make schools more inclusive, but the proposals will almost certainly face resistance from Republican-controlled legislatures in states like Texas and South Dakota, which have approved measures that allow discrimination against transgender students.