NYC opens first all gay High School

Because the "she was wearing a skimpy dress, she deserved it" example is an easy way out which requires minimal amount of thought

yes .... and that's enough to make us understand who he is .......

Derek i dunno whereu went to school but in mine everyone got hassle from someone or other at least some of the time they were there whether it be for being too smart, not smart enough, being ugly, not dressing nice and yes even being gay.

one way or other u can either deal with it and get on with ur life or u can hide from it and thats exactly what these schools are doing, turning their backs on the fact that everyone gets harrased at one point or another and that is no proper way to be brought up, thinking that u can be sheltered from the way the world works, because lets face it, it's not nice but it is how things go.

me n my girlfriend were talking about werther or not to send our kids to a private fee paying school when we have them and i said no because it doesn;t matter what school u go to, if you want to learn and be taught, u will and people who got o fee paying schools r pretty much brought up assuming that they're better than other people because they drive nicer cars and pay to goto school. most people who goto these schools dont even know how to get on a bus (and i'm speaking from knowing people like this) and that is not a healthy way to be brought up to deal with life.

the gay school is pretty much the same thing, it'll bring them up thinking they're different from everyone else which is apparently the opposite of what they're aiming for and they won;t have a grasp of reality, imagien going to an all gay school. no hate, no abuse and then u go into the big bad world at 18 and realise that not everyone is tolerant.


life isn't the cards that your dealt, it's what you do with the hand

In agreement with you Jim.

Believe whatever you choose to believe. You dont' have to agree with the formation of the school or with my posts.
However, that fact that the read world is not pretty is not enough reason to me to negate a legitimate attempt to try and make some highschool adolescents educational experience in a free public school system free of excessive abuse at the hands of others.

And Mongoose - if you can't add anything constructive to any conversation, please cease communicating beyond simple grunts and growls as the smell of wood burning and cogs jamming as your brain tries to comprehend most topics on this board is getting a bit nauseating. Could you open a window?

Without reading much of this topic, surely by opening this school - they r contributing to the seclusion that is experienced by ppl who r gay. They will be brought up to believe they ARE different, and that they should stay in their secluded group....

well said Mike, nothing to add

I support the idea of a school for GLBT kids. Fat kids don't tend to get physically attacked just because they're fat. Poor kids are oppressed by virtue of their lack of economic/social resources, but again, it's not a fair comparison.

Some of the nastier comments I've read here about reverse discrimination illustrates that likely you have no clue what it's like to be harassed by students because you're not straight...so you may have no idea that it can literally be physically dangerous just to attend school if you're not seen as [even if you actually are] a member of the straight majority).

- Youth suicide studies have found gay and lesbian youth to be two to six times more likely to attempt suicide than other youth. Suicides of gay and lesbian youth may account for 30% of all completed suicides among teens. (Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1989.)

- Parents, Friends, and Families of Lesbians and Gays, or P-FLAG, reported that in a study of students in public high schools, 97% of the students surveyed reported regularly hearing homophobic remarks from their peers (Making Schools Safe for Gay and Lesbian Youth: Report of the Massachusetts Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth, 1993.)

- In a 1993 national survey conducted by the American Association of University Women, youth described being called lesbian or gay as the most deeply upsetting form of sexual harassment they experienced. A total of 1,632 field surveys were completed by public school students, grades 8-11, in 79 schools across the United States.

- In a report to the American Psychological Association in August 1998, Dr. Karen Franklin indicated that the majority of young people who harass, bully and assault GLBT people do not fit the stereotype of hate-filled extremists, but are average-age young people who often see nothing inappropriate about their behavior.

- The National Network of Runaway and Youth Services estimates that gay, lesbian and bisexual youth make up 20-40% of homeless youth in urban areas. (To Whom Do They Belong?: Runaway, Homeless and Other Youth in High-Risk Situations in the 1990's. [1991] Washington, D.C.: The National Network

If New York is providing a safe space for non-straight students to be able to get the same kind of an education that straight students automatically receive, by virtue of their majority sexual orientation status, I'm all for it. I don't live in New York but if I did, I'd cheerfully pay the $.03 or whatever extra in taxes.

All kids should be able to get a good quality, safe education, period. That's one of the goals of No Child Left Behind.

And where do I get off writing all this? Because I'm earning a degree in educational policy studies, and I've done a great deal of work--within and outside of the classroom--analyzing policy and putting it to practical use by actually supporting students.

Just my irritable $.02.

Cricket

Becky, I'll take a shot at this. There is already a legally/fiscally established precedent, including economic/educational policy, regarding the establishment of magnet schools (as someone, perhaps Derek, already pointed out). In the school district in the town where I work/teach/study, there are a number of magnet schools. Some are language-specific: a French immersion school and a Spanish immersion school, for example. Others are culturally specific, including an Afri-centric school.

A good argument can be made that one's sexual orientation/identity translates, for some (not all) people into membership in a particular cultural group. As a result, a magnet school created to create a safe educational space for that particular cultural group is consistent with previous educational policy.

Just as non-African American students can elect to participate in the lottery system for taking classes at an Afri-centric school, so too could straight kids participate in the application process for a GLBT-focused cultural school.

Becky, since you work for students in an educational environment, it may be helpful for you to read up on some of the ways that GLBT students have been harmed, systematically, in different school systems around the country. Since you asked about legal information, I'll give you some details regarding two recent legal cases that have received prominent media attention, highlighting GLBT students’ experiences within unsupportive school systems.

In Nabozny v. Podlesny, 92 F.3d 446 (7th Cir. 1996), the United States Court of Appeals reviewed the middle and high school experiences of Jamie Nabozny, a Wisconsin student who had experienced years of physical abuse and verbal harassment at the hands of his peers, while his various school systems’ administrators took little to no action to address the problem.

It's important to note that Nabozny lived in a supportive home environment. His parents repeatedly met with school administrators who failed to take any action to ensure that Nabozny would not be physically harmed while he attended school. Instead, the level of violence directed against Nabozny increased from year to year, to the extent that Nabozny eventually attempted suicide while in eighth grade.

In high school, the violence further escalated in scope and significance, perpetrated by the same students who had harassed Nabozny while he was in middle school. After being beaten to the point of requiring surgery, Nabozny reported the incident to the high school’s assistant principal, who reacted by laughing and telling Nabozny that he deserved such treatment because he is gay.

In July 1996, in a precedent-setting federal appellate court decision, the court reviewing Jamie’s case spelled out the constitutional obligation of all U.S. public schools to treat the abuse of gay and lesbian students as seriously as they would treat any other abuse. Four months later, in November 1996 after a two-day trial, a federal jury found that school officials were liable for failing to protect Nabozny; he was awarded more than $900,000 in a settlement reached after that verdict.

More recently, in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 119 S.Ct. 1661 (1999), in a 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court clarified that schools which willfully ignore the sexual harassment of one student by another can be held for violating civil rights law under Title IX, the federal law which bans sex discrimination in public schools. The Davis case involved a boy’s severe sexual harassment of a female student.

The Supreme Court’s decision expanded the protection of students beyond the range of teacher-on-student to student-on-student harassment, under Title IX. Title IX, intended to help create safe environments for all students, may now be used in some instances to help address other cases of harassment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual students.

So, there is a federal as well as arguably local legal precedent that can support the creation of this type of school.

Cricket

schools r dangerous places for anybody. at one point when i was in 4th year at high school there was a massive fight between pretty much every areas gang that went to the school and we're talking bout guys running around with machetes, knives, claw hammers and alot of nasty things.

people who were fighting got hurt, people who weren't got hurt, it happens in school they are dangerous places and as i said before everyone gets a hard time of it once in a while.

if ur going to open all gay schools because gay people don;t want to experience violence or abuse then u'll have to open all black schools cos blacks kids probably get a harder time of it than gays, a school for poor kids and why stop at that we'd need to open a school for "normal" kids who just didnt want called names.


i dunno about u guys but when i went to school if someone calls u a name its no sweat, if someone hits u, u hit them back and if a team gets u, u get a bigger team to get them back.