High school students to participate in Gay Straight Alliance Summit

High school students from around Saskatchewan are heading to Bedford Road Collegiate Saturday to learn how a Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) can benefit their schools.

Hosted by OUTSaskatoon and Camp fYrefly, the second annual Gay Straight Alliance Summit aims to bring together students from across the province in a forum where they can discuss and learn how to create a safe space for LGBTQ people within their schools.

More than 150 people are registered to attend the summit. They’ll take part in workshops and listen to a keynote address by Rae Spoon, a well known non-binary transgender musician and author.

Amanda Guthrie, the education and operations manager at OUTSaskatoon, says beginning a GSA is the best way to support students who may be feeling alone or marginalized.

“I think schools, as well as being a place where we receive education, they should also be spaces where we find community and gay straight alliances are an easy and obvious way to do that,” she explains. “We need to be embracing diversity while also normalizing diversity because LGBTQ students have always been in our schools here in Saskatchewan.”

But GSAs aren’t only for LGBTQ students, they can also be a place for students to learn what it means to be an ally to the LGBTQ community.

Guthrie also adds it is becoming much more normalized for schools to embrace GSAs, noting she has seen a huge increase in their existence throughout small town Saskatchewan during the last few years with a few elementary schools even embracing the idea, but says it can still be a fight to justify their existence.

“There is the handful of people saying ‘it’s completely fine to be gay, we don’t need GSAs anymore’ — but of course we still do,” she explains. “And of course there’s also the demographic of people who blatantly don’t support LGBTQ students so we need to be making sure those students who are facing those experiences, whether at home or in their communities at large, know there is a safe space they can go to.”

That safe space might actually lead to a safer school overall. According to a 2012 survey from Egale Canada, schools with a GSA in place for three years or longer actually saw a reduction in bullying rates — for all students, not only those who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum.