Imagine the concerns of same-sex families with children in the Midland School District in Arkansas. In October 2010, the vice president of the district, Clint McCance, responded to requests for students to wear purple in the wake of the nationally reported spate of gay teenage suicides by writing, “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers killed themselves. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE [Author’s note: Spelling and punctuation from the original].”1 The outpouring of public revulsion at his comments eventually led to his emotional apology and resignation during a television appearance. A year later, a similar scene played out in New Jersey. In October 2011, New Jersey teacher Vicki Knox posted a hateful diatribe against LGBTs: “Homosexuality is a perverted spirit that has existed from the beginning of creation. The word of God refers to it often. That’s if you believe the Word to be truly God’s intended blueprint for his people. I have friends and loved ones who are practicing/living as homosexuals. Yes I love can care about them. We hug and exchange gifts. We have family dinners. But how they live and their actions, behaviors—CHOICES are against the nature and character of God!… I know sin and it breeds like cancer!”2 The governor of the state quickly denounced her, and the Human Rights Campaign initiated a letter-writing campaign to the local school board. Simultaneously, social conservatives groups rallied to her cause; the National Organization for Marriage, for example, labeled her a “Christian martyr.”3
While lesbian and gay parents were no doubt reassured by the national condemnation McCance and Knox received, these incidents also spotlighted a problem that is rife in schools across the country: students, teachers, and other school personnel can and do subvert efforts to make schools safe for all youth, including the children of LGBT parents.
Much of what we know about the school experiences of children of LGBT parents comes from anecdotal reports and a small number of studies. For example, a 2008 meta-analysis of nineteen studies examining developmental outcomes for LGBT-parented youth found, “Children raised by gay or lesbian parents face a number of challenges in the classroom. First, many teachers are not well educated on same-sex relationships and school administrators are reluctant to discuss the issue. Second, many prospective teachers hold negative views toward gay and lesbian individuals, potentially adversely affecting the relationships these teachers will have with sexual-minority students and families. Third, teachers are not likely to initiate a safe and welcoming environment for gay and lesbian students or their parent(s).”4
The most exhaustive resource is Involved, Invisible, Ignored, a 2008 study published by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) that explores the experiences of LGBT parents and children in US public schools. Half of all the students in the study reported feeling unsafe in school, and the most commonly offered reason was having an LGBT parent; 40 percent reported they had been verbally harassed in school because of their family; 38 percent reported being verbally harassed in school because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation (even though the vast majority of respondents identified themselves as heterosexual); and 12 percent reported they had been physically harassed or assaulted in the past year because they had LGBT parents. Nearly a quarter of students had been mistreated by or received negative comments from the parents of other students specifically because they had an LGBT parent. Finally, 11 percent of students reported being directly mistreated by a teacher, and 15 percent heard negative comments by teachers.5
Children of LGBT parents are also made to feel excluded in schools. One student reported, “When people and our teacher talk about LGBT people in class and everyone laughs because they think it’s gross or something, I feel uncomfortable because I’m the only one not laughing. It’s like there [sic] making fun of me in a way.”6 More than 30 percent of students in the study reported feeling that they could not fully participate in school specifically because they had an LGBT parent, and 36 percent felt that school personnel did not acknowledge that they were from an LGBT family. In addition, about a fifth of students reported that they had been discouraged from talking about their parents or family at school by a teacher, principal, or other school staff person. Consider this comment from an eleventh grader: “In Spanish [class], we were doing a project that involved describing our home and introducing our family. I talked to my teacher and explained my situation, and she said it would be better for me to say I had a single mother and not mention her partner at all. It made me mad, so I made a point of including my other mom, and I ended up failing the project.”7 And a ninth grader reported, “We had a dance team banquet and we were supposed to have our parents come, but our directors said it would be better if I only brought one of my moms so I would not cause a disruption.”8
Students in the study observed that the three most common sources of their feelings of exclusion were: they received negative responses about having LGBT parents; they were discouraged by school staff from being open about their parents or family; and LGBT families were not included in school activities.9
Obviously, for many children of LGBT parents, school is an unpleasant, if not outright dangerous and hostile experience. However, their needs have been have been marginalized by a focus on the school experiences of LGBT youth. In her book Let’s Get This Straight, Tina Fakhrid-Deen interviewed the children of LGBT parents across the United States. Not surprisingly, a prevailing topic was their school experiences. As she notes, “Although we receive less attention, children with gay parents often experience or witness anti-LGBTQ backlash and exclusion that is similar to that experienced by gay students.”10 Unfortunately, these students may delay or avoid seeking help from teachers or administrators for academic or social issues because they recognize that these concerns will reflect on their parents and family as a whole.11 And these children may also not tell their parents of these same problems (including mistreatment) in order to protect them from a hostile school environment or to keep school officials oblivious to their family makeup.12 Thus they doubly isolate themselves.”
Geographic of financial constraints (or both) mean that many LGBT parents have few options as to where their children attend school. Forty-six percent of LGBT parents who send their children to private, secular schools report that a primary reason for sending their children to a particular institution is its reputation for being welcoming.13 But this choice it out of the reach of many LGBT parents—the average annual tuition at a private school is $8,549 but rises to $17,316 for a non-sectarian private school.14 And even for those parents who have the resources to pay for a private school, not all schools are open to the children of LGBT families. In sum, the majority of LGBT parents (78 percent) send their children to public school.15
One of the earliest studies (1992) of gay and lesbian parents found that many did not disclose their sexuality and family configuration to schools due to an apparent or perceived lack of respect, tolerance, and welcoming. Additionally, many gay and lesbian parents were living in fear of being outed, resulting in negative consequences for both themselves their children. The study also recognized parents’ concerns that remaining closeted might inadvertently send a negative message to their own children about the desirability of same-sex parents.16 Though this study is now more than twenty years old—and in spite of Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs); growing acceptance of LGBT families; national, state, and local efforts at tolerance; and antibullying programs—the experiences of LGBT parents two decades ago is still uncomfortably reminiscent of the struggles that today’s parents confront.
On the positive side, All Children Matter: How Legal and Social Inequalities Hurt LGBT Families, a comprehensive 2011 overview of LGBT parents in the United States, cites research that finds that these parents are more likely than heterosexual parents to be involved in their children’s schools—more likely to volunteer, to attend parent-teacher conferences, and to contact teachers about their children’s academic performance or school experience.17 The report, however, draws a sobering conclusion about the reason for this investment: it is yet another manifestation of the need to appear perfect in the community so as to nullify doubts as to LGBT parents’ competence.18
Involved, Invisible, Ignored examined the experiences of LGBT parents with children attending kindergarten through twelfth grade. The majority of parents reported a relatively low incidence of negative experiences with school personnel. However, 26 percent reported that other parents at school had mistreated them and 21 percent described hearing negative comments about being LGBT from other students at their children’s school.19 One dramatic example cited was the experience of a lesbian mother who teaches in the same school her children attend:
My main problem is with other parents. I keep my personal life private because I work at the school my children attend. As a teacher, I don’t feel I have to announce anything, but other parents who have assumed that I’m a lesbian have made a point of spreading the word. There was also a teacher who thought it was her place to “out” me to the other teachers at a meeting that I was not at. I have had to file a police report on a parent for putting their hands on my son and screaming and calling me a “stupid lesbian bitch” in the office while my stepson’s class was passing.20
Sometimes one parent receives the brunt of school-related opprobrium, and often this is the nonbiological parent. Consider this parent’s observation: “The teacher’s assistant almost always ignores my partner or is short with her, especially if she picks up my daughter without me… Also people always want to know who is the ‘real’ parent, meaning who gave birth to our girls.”21
Like their children, lesbian and gay parents reported feeling excluded. One parent, for example, said, “For mother’s day, my son’s teacher did not allow him to make two items [one for each mother], only permitting my son to make one mother’s day gift when clearly the teacher knows there are two mothers.”22 Another reported, “[We] just don’t get invited to participate or volunteer at school functions or outings.”23 Overall, more than half of the parents surveyed reported some form of exclusion, and a quarter felt this exclusion as an overall feeling of neglect and invisibility. Additionally, a sizable number of parents also reported intrusive questioning about their family and even sex lives.
Sometimes the most difficult aspect for LGBT parents is watching their child suffer not only at the hands of other children but through the actions of adults in the school who are supposed to be supporting them. One mother wrote, “My daughter was bullied by a lunch lady who insisted that every child has a daddy. When I followed up with the teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent, they all conveyed to me that this was simply a ‘misunderstanding’ and a great deal of time and effort was spent to help me understand the lunch lady’s perspective and ‘background.’”24 Another recalled, “My nine-year-old daughter received pro-Christian, antigay literature in her backpack from a classmate. The child’s mother indicated to the child that the pamphlets were because my child had parents that were going to hell—but that the mother loved my child anyway.”25
Finally, some parents recognized that their own children’s discomfort about their family configuration prevented any meaningful intervention for school challenges. One parent reported, “My son is very concerned about his peers and what they will think of my relationship. Since he is in middle school and there is a lot of homophobia among his peers, I have agreed to let him be the one to tell people. As far as I know, he has only told one other person.”26 Another reported, “At the fifth-grade graduation, my child did not want me to attend, and would not state a specific reason, only to say that the other children gave her a hard time about me since I am not her birth mother.”27
Student populations across the country are growing increasingly diverse. A common approach schools take is to minimize differences by treating each and every student the same; managing diversity means ignoring diversity. A more progressive approach, one that is fortunately on the rise, considers the multiple needs and perspectives of all students. Indications of this approach include cultural celebrations, bulletin board displays, and the hiring of staff from diverse backgrounds. However, many progressive educators believe that such measures are not enough. In the collection Rethinking Multicultural Education, Enid Lee, the renowned author of two books on multicultural education and the former supervisor of race/ethnic relations for the North York Board of Education in Toronto, writes: “First there is the surface stage in which people change a few expressions of culture in the school. They make welcome signs in several languages and have a variety of foods and festivals. My problem is not that they start there. My concern is that they often stop there… You don’t have to fill your head with little details of about what other cultural groups eat and dance. You need to take a look at your culture, what your ideal of normal is, and realize it is quite limited and is in fact just reflecting a particular experience.”28
Lee asks tough questions: Whose perspective is heard? Whose is ignored? In whose interest is it that we study what we study? Why is it that certain kinds of knowledge are hidden? The most advanced form of multicultural education doesn’t seek merely to instill students with facts about different cultures but aims instead to examine the biases of the dominant culture and teach skills to challenge inequality and prejudice. According to Stuart Biegel, a member of the education and law faculty at UCLA and the author of The Right to Be Out: Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in America’s Public Schools, “Scholars have found overwhelmingly that an inclusive curriculum reflecting the existence of diverse communities in our pluralistic society benefits everyone and hurts no one.”29 In regard to the inclusion of gay, lesbian, and bisexual and transgender topics into the scholastic curriculum, he said, “A gay-inclusive curriculum not only helps create a welcoming and supportive environment for all students but has a particularly important benefit for gay and gender-nonconforming youth, the children of LGBT parents, and the friends and families of LGBT students in education settings.”30
A common complaint and concern by LGBT parents and their children reported in the Involved, Invisible, and Ignored study was that their families were elided or excised from school curricula. Less than a third of students (27 percent) and parents (29 percent) reported that the school curriculum had included representations of LGBT people, history, or events in the past school year. When these topics were included, less than a quarter (21 percent) of all students in the survey reported positive representations of LGBT people, history or events.31
In December 2010, California state senator Mark Leno introduced the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive, and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act to prohibit discriminatory education and ensure that LGBT people are fairly and accurately included in instructional materials. The bill prohibited the State Board of Education from adopting instructional materials that discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. According to Leno, “Most textbooks don’t include any historical information about the LGBT movement, which has great significance to both California and U.S. history. Our collective silence on this issue perpetuates negative stereotypes of LGBT people and leads to increased bullying of young people. We can’t simultaneously tell youth that it’s OK to be yourself and live an honest, open life when we aren’t even teaching students about historical LGBT figures or the LGBT equal rights movement.”32 Despite the inevitable backlash, the bill was signed into law on July 14, 2011. Immediately, a coalition of antigay groups, including the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council (FRC), began collecting petitions ballot referendum to overturn the act. FRC’s president, Tony Perkins, offered a summary of the arguments against FAIR, an act that “indoctrinates” youth with a curriculum that not only introduces students to transgender, bisexual, and homosexual identities but also sanctions them. First, students in California schools are already falling behind in core subjects (science, math, and reading) so they shouldn’t be diverted from these areas to placate the “political agenda of a few.” Second, the cost of new textbooks and classroom materials containing “this propaganda” is too onerous in the current financial climate. Third, teachers and school administrators will be forced to “violate their consciences by advocating for behavior they find morally objectionable.” Finally, children will be “indoctrinated” by these educational materials.33 In a PowerPoint presentation, FRC illustrates the deplorable impact of FAIR in one particular image in which parents are warned that students will now learn less about George Washington in order to learn about Chaz Bono.34 In spite of (or possibly because of) this hyperventilating hyperbole, the required number of signatures necessary to force a referendum was not obtained.
Mombian founder Dana Rudolph has written about her efforts to find children’s books about LGBT events and people: “The fact is, children’s books about real LGBT people and LGBT civil-rights events are even scarcer than children’s LGBT-inclusive fiction books… Even if schools or teachers want to offer inclusive materials, there are none to be found.” Rudolph found three books targeting elementary and middle school children.35 Even if such resources did exist, according to Paul Boneberg, executive director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, “I’m not sure how we plug it into the curriculum at the grade school level, if at all.”36 Thus the California FAIR Act is indeed on the cutting edge of inclusiveness.
Of course, the efforts of the religious right and some social conservatives to preclude inclusive education have gone hand in hand with their efforts to make public schools more Christian. The religious right’s constant attempts to “Christianize” (as that movement narrowly defines its faith) public schools also threaten the freedom to learn about many topics beyond LGBT-related issues. Battles over school curricula are occurring across the country, and they are not relegated to small communities. Consider the state of Texas. In 2011, governor Rick Perry appointed Barbara Cargill to serve as chair of the state school board. She described the debate over science education a “spiritual battle” in which she favors teaching the “strengths and weaknesses of evolution,” including creationism.37 In 2011, Oklahoma representative Sally Kern introduced HB 1551, the Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act, which allows teachers to present creationist concepts without fear of losing their jobs.38 Florida representative Stephen Wise sponsored SB 1854, which would amend Florida state law and require public schools to engage in “critical analysis” of evolution.39 On the surface, these machinations may not sound overtly threatening to LGBT issues, but when one recalls that the creationists teach that homosexuality is a “genetic mistake” and a result of “original sin,” we can be sure that schools adopting these policies wouldn’t be welcoming to LGBT families.
Of course, creationism isn’t the only focus of those attempting to “Christianize” education. In Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia, and Missouri, bills have been introduced that would allow public schools to develop Bible-study courses, offer prayers in public schools, and/or display overtly religious symbols (typically the Ten Commandments) on school grounds. According to Citizens United, an organization dedicated to the separation of church and state, politicians across the country are attempting to “inject religion into public schools, foster unconstitutional forms of government-sponsored religion and obliterate strong protections that prevent state funding of religious institutions, including allowing taxes to fund schools that teach religious dogma.”40
In 2006, in the seemingly gay-friendly haven of Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, Steve Sokoll, a child psychiatrist raising two children with his partner, donated the book And Tango Makes Three—a children’s book based on a true story about two male penguins raising a baby—to the school library. The school district was loud in its refusal of the book. “I found your gift to the classroom to be unacceptable,” an official wrote in a letter to Sokoll. Sokoll argued his point, but the school district refused to acquiesce.41
In 1982 the US Supreme Court struck down a New York school district’s attempt at book censorship. As Justice William Brennan wrote, “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.’”42 Nevertheless, such efforts continue today. According to the American Library Association (ALA), approximately 85 percent of the challenges to library materials receive no media attention and remain unreported. Moreover, this statistic is limited to books and does not include challenges to magazines, newspapers, films, broadcasts, plays, performances, electronic publications, or exhibits. Sex, profanity, and racism remain the primary categories of objections.43 Not surprisingly, books with positive LGBT characters are often a source of community ire. And Tango Makes Three is the most banned book in the last half decade; individuals and groups in at least fifteen states have challenged libraries over it, seeking to have the book labeled with a content warning, moved to a different section of the library, or removed from shelves altogether, according to the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom.44
Of the students who took part in the Involved, Invisible, Ignored study, only a little more than a quarter (29 percent) said that their school library contained materials that included LGBT-related topics.45 Forty-five percent also said that they were able to use school computers to access websites about LGBT-related information.46 Public schools use web-filtering software to block students’ access to pornographic websites. This is in accordance with federal law; however, the software also blocks LGBT websites that are not sexually explicit, including the websites for LGBT rights organizations. At the same time, they allow access to anti-LGBT sites that condemn LGBT people or urge them to try to change their sexual orientation. In one example, in 2009, Andrew Emitt, a high school senior in Knoxville, Tennessee, used the computer in his school library to search for scholarship information for LGBT students. However, every website for an LGBT organization that came up in his search engine turned out to be blocked by his school district’s web-filtering software. Upon further investigation, he found that organizations espousing antigay perspectives were accessible. “I wasn’t looking for anything sexual or inappropriate,” said Andrew. “I wasn’t looking for games or chat rooms or dating sites. I was just looking for information about scholarships for LGBT students, and I couldn’t get to it because of this software.”47
The ACLU began its “Don’t Filter Me” campaign in February 2011 by asking students to find out whether their schools were blocking web content that provides resources for LGBT students or expresses support for the equal treatment of LGBT people while allowing anti-LGBT viewpoints. By August 31, the ACLU had investigated and confirmed eighty-four reports of anti-LGBT-viewpoint discriminatory web filtering at public schools in twenty-four states.48 According to Joshua Block, staff attorney with the ACLU LGBT project, “These filters are designed to discriminate and programmed specifically to target LGBT-related content that would not otherwise be blocked as sexually explicit or inappropriate. Public schools have a duty to provide students with viewpoint-neutral access to the Internet.”49 ACLU senior staff attorney Mary Catherine Roper added, “We aren’t talking about sex websites—we’re talking about websites that help high school students learn about themselves and about social issues. That’s part of how schools prepare students for life.”50
As a result of the “Don’t Filter Me” campaign, many of the schools that were found to be filtering LGBT content have made changes to their software programs; others, though, have been less responsive, and the ACLU is in the process of pre-litigation negotiations.
In December 2008, the Milwaukee Board of Education approved the opening of the country’s first gay-friendly middle school. The Alliance School, serving sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, was the brainchild of Tina Owen, an English teacher and a lesbian raising five children with her partner. “I was hearing horrible stories about kids bullied and beat up and not coming back to school anymore,” Owen said. “[Parents] want their kids in a safe place.”51 The Alliance School is not the first gay-friendly school in the United States; Harvey Milk High School in New York is the most renowned of these institutions. In 2008, Chicago attempted to create a similar school. The school, originally christened with the unwieldy moniker School for Social Justice Pride Campus, quickly attracted the attention of social conservatives, and changes occurred rapidly. The proposed school was renamed Solidarity High School. Since its critics had argued that LGBT teens aren’t the only ones being bullied and that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to provide a one-sided education on this topic, the school expanded its mission to create a safe environment for all students who had experienced bullying and mistreatment in other schools. Eventually, the project was scuttled.
It should be noted that it isn’t just social conservatives and the religious right who object to the creation of schools targeting sexual-minority youth; many allies and even LGBT individuals express their concerns. According to principal Chad Weiden of the failed Chicago effort, “We had the most resistance from within the LGBT community.”52 Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor at Cornell University who chairs the human development department, stated, “Being segregated doesn’t help gay kids learn, it doesn’t help straight kids learn, it doesn’t help bullies learn. All it does is relieve the school and the teachers of responsibility.”53 Opponents dubbed the school “Homo High” and suggested that its creation gave other schools an impression that intolerance would be acceptable elsewhere. They also expressed concern that these students would not learn the skills to cope with an often homonegative world.
Regardless of the presence of the few gay-friendly schools, the overwhelming majority of communities do not offer schools for LGBT students or even describe their respective educational institutions as “gay-friendly.” Many schools, though, have created gay-straight alliances (GSAs), school clubs that foster an environment of respect and acceptance. According to GLSEN, GSAs “improve school climate for LGBT students. When a GSA is present, LGBT students hear homophobic remarks less often, experience less harassment and assault, feel safer at school, skip school less often and have a greater sense of belonging.”54
Four thousand GSAs are registered with GLSEN.55 Still, a study of the children of LGBT parents found only about a third (34 percent) said that their school had a GSA or other kind of student club that addressed LGBT student issues. Additionally, an intriguing 2011 study called into question the benefit of GSAs for schools demonstrating high levels of hostility and intolerance. It found that GSAs are most beneficial for schools that already have low rates of LGBT victimization.56 According to the study’s authors, “[T]his finding suggests that the creation of and membership in GSAs in schools cannot be accepted by schools as the only solution for creating safer school climates for LGBT youth.”57
Some schools administrations and concerned parents also actively resist the presence of GSAs in their schools. But this is difficult to do without running afoul of the federal Equal Access Act, a 1984 law stipulating that if a public school allows any non-curriculum-based student club to meet during noninstructional time, it must allow them all. Ironically, the religious right originally promoted this act, since it opened the doors to the formation of Christian clubs on school grounds. Now some believe it has gone too far, particularly in regard to clubs supportive of sexual minorities. In one case, administrators at the Four Bluffs High School in Corpus Christi, Texas, decided to ban all student clubs rather than allow a GSA to meet. After the ACLU threatened legal intervention, school administrators capitulated and permitted the alliance to meet.58
The final component of the triumvirate to create safer schools for LGBT youth, along with gay-friendly schools and GSAs, is antibullying efforts. In October 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a guidance letter to schools and colleges reminding them that failure to address bullying could result in financial penalties from the federal government. “We’re going to really challenge places that have their heads in the sand and aren’t displaying the courage to move ahead in the right direction,” said Duncan.59 President Obama reiterated this, declaring, “We have an obligation to ensure that our schools are safe for all of our kids. Every single young person deserves the opportunity to learn and grow and achieve their potential, without having to worry about the constant threat of harassment.”60 The department is also conducting case studies in twenty-four school sites on the effectiveness and implementation of bullying policy.
At present, forty-five states have already passed laws addressing bullying or harassment in school, and ultimately it is state officials who determine whether new or revised legislation and policies should be introduced to update, improve, or add bullying-prevention provisions.61 However, a November 2011 controversy regarding Michigan’s belated attempt to pass anti-bullying legislation demonstrates the obstacles that can occur with even the most well-intentioned efforts to protect students. The bill, called Matt’s Safe School Law (stemming from the 2002 bullying-related suicide of freshman Matthew Epling), had been unsuccessfully introduced into the Michigan legislation several times. But in the most recent effort, new wording was inserted that negated much of what had come earlier in the bill. The extra paragraph states that the bill “does not abridge the rights under the First Amendment… of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil or pupil’s parent or guardian” and that it does not “prohibit a statement of a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction of a of a school employee, school volunteer, pupil or pupil’s parent or guardian.”62
LGBT activists and advocates were quick to pounce. Nationally syndicated columnist D’Anne Witkowski wrote, “It’s kind of hard to imagine why a legislative body would want to yank the fangs out of a measure initially designed to protect children. That is, until you consider that Michigan is one of the few states that doesn’t have an anti-bullying law due, in large part, to anti-gay advocates who have fought against such a measure for years fearing that it would violate the religious freedom of anti-gay students… Wouldn’t this bill protect a bully telling a suspected gay classmate that homosexuals should be stoned to death… And don’t these statements create the kind of climate that so many LGBT students have found intolerable to the point of suicide?”63 Matthew Epling’s father was dismayed by the interpolation of a religious exception for bullying in school: “They kind of snuck in this extra paragraph, really kind of setting apart kids that feel their religious beliefs, their moral convictions, basically, can allow them to bully… That one paragraph, though, negates most of the things we tried to put in.”64
The Involved, Invisible, Ignored study succinctly summarized the school experience of children of LGBT parents: “For many students with LGBT parents, school is not a very safe environment.”65 While several prominent organizations such as the Family Equality Council and GLSEN have formulated guidelines and recommendations for schools in regard to LGBT parents and their children, they are often not implemented. Currently, most of the efforts at creating safe, respectful, and inclusive schools—LGBT-friendly schools, GSAs, and anti-bullying legislation—target LGBT youth. Still, these efforts no doubt foster better school climates for the children of LGBT parents, even if their experiences and needs are not in the forefront of those promoting these changes. Fortunately, the last half decade has given a voice to these families, and they are bringing it to bear on this challenging aspect of LBGT family life.