Student Discrimination In The News Again.

In the past, I wrote about school discrimination against transgender students. Well now we can look at what happens when a school system prevented a trans-student from attending her Prom.

Lambda Legal Reaches Settlement Agreement with Indiana School District After Transgender Student Was Barred from Prom

(Gary, Ind., January 28, 2011)—Today Lambda Legal announced the resolution of a lawsuit against Gary School Corporation brought by transgender former student K.K. Logan, who was barred from prom at West Side High School in 2006 because she wore a dress.

"Gary School Corporation's new policies and trainings will help to ensure that other students don't face discrimination because of who they are or what they wear," said Christopher Clark, Senior Staff Attorney in Lambda Legal's Midwest Regional Office in Chicago. "It is unfortunate that Gary School Corporation has spent almost four years defending a discriminatory policy. The message for schools across the country should be clear—they should adopt and follow dress code policies that respect the rights of all students, and they should let all students attend the school prom without discrimination based on gender identity or expression."
[…]
In December 2007, Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit on behalf of K.K. Logan challenging that policy arguing that it violates students' First Amendment freedom of expression. Logan also claimed that exclusion from the prom constituted discrimination on the basis of gender.

You would think that schools would have learned by now that they cannot discriminate against trans-students or on the basis of sexual orientation. Do you remember last year when I wrote about Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi banning a woman from bring her girlfriend to the prom. When the school was forced to allow then to attend the prom, the schools system held a fake prom for them to attend. Or when the Mohawk Central School District in New York lost a law suite for not protecting a transgender student,

Settlement reached in lawsuit against Mohawk school district
By David Robinson
The Evening Times
Posted Mar 29, 2010

Mohawk, N.Y. — A settlement has been reached in a lawsuit filed last year on behalf of a gay student alleging that the Mohawk Central School District failed to protect him from threats and physical assaults and ignored repeated bullying.
[…]
The NYCLU and school district released statements on the settlement.
“This lawsuit affirms that school districts nationwide have the responsibility to protect children from bullying and harassment based on sexual orientation and gender non-conformity,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman. “No child should live in fear of going to school.”
[…]
The federal lawsuit alleged over the past two years, prior to this school year, the student was subjected to relentless verbal and physical abuse, culminating in another student bringing a knife and making a death threat.

A failure by district officials to formally investigate harassment, discipline students or even inform the student and his parents of their right to file complaints under board of education grievance procedures is also part of claims made in the lawsuit.

You would think that the schools would get the message by now, they must provide a safe space for students and they must not discriminate against LGBT students. That they should take heed of the letter from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights.

That letter came about because of the dedication of a mother of a student who was being bullied.

Feds protect gay youth thanks to pioneering activist-mom
What legal protections exist for glbt youth in schools?
Psychology Today:
by Elizabeth Meyer, Ph.D.
Published on January 27, 2011

What legal protections exist for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth in schools? If there is no clear school policy or state law (like the one recently passed in New Jersey) do these students have any source of support? Thanks to the work of Carolyn Wagner, a pioneering activist-mom from Arkansas, glbt students in public institutions are protected by Title IX. Sadly, this brave leader for GLBT equality recently passed away after a battle with cancer. This blog post is written to thank her for the changes she initiated and to continue informing schools and education professionals about their legal and ethical responsibilities to prevent and respond to incidents of sex discrimination.
[…]
The truth is that Title IX has been used to protect students from discrimination based on sexual orientation since the 1999 decision in the Wagner v. Fayetteville Public Schools case. The parents were able to file suit under Title IX because in 1997, the OCR released guidelines explicitly including gay and lesbian students under sexual harassment protections. Since then, there have been several other cases in California (Ray v. Antioch Unified School District, 2000), Minnesota (Montgomery v. Independent School District No. 709, 2000), and Nevada (Henkle v. Gregory, 2001) where Title IX was applied to protect students from anti-gay harassment. In the Ray v. Antioch decision, the court's rationale is explained as follows:

"[T]he court finds no material difference between the instance in which a female student is subject to unwelcome sexual comments and advances due to her harasser's perception that she is a sexual object, and the instance in which a male student is insulted and abused due to his harasser's perception that he is homosexual, and therefore a subject of prey. In both instances, the conduct is a heinous response to the harasser's perception of the victim's sexuality, and is not distinguishable to this court." 107 F. Supp. 2d at 1170

Title IX has also been applied to cases of gender expression since 2005 due to a decision in the case Theno v. Tonganoxie. In this case, the court wrote that "the plaintiff was harassed because he failed to satisfy his peers' stereotyped expectations for his gender because the primary objectives of plaintiff's harassers appears to have been to disparage his perceived lack of masculinity" (p. 952). The court concluded that the harassment was so, "severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denied (him) an education" (p. 966). The district settled the case for $440,000.