What Happens When Schools Do The Right Thing

When schools allow trans students to fully integrate in school nothing happens.

These schools let transgender students use the bathroom, and here’s what happened
Highlights:

• Schools in Missouri and across the nation have quietly made change with little trouble
• Their actions preceded federal guidance on the issue
• Meanwhile, some states, including Kansas, are suing feds over bathroom policy

The Kansas City Star
By Curtis Tata, Megan Henney, John Tompkins and Eleanor Mueller
June 20, 2016

WASHINGTON At least once a day, Pam Retzlaff answered a call from parents concerned about her decision to allow a transgender student at Edgar Road Elementary School to use a bathroom different from his biological gender.

“It was hard in the beginning, very hard,” she said. “You can imagine my first open house. I had more parents in my office than ever before.”

It was new territory for Retzlaff, then principal of the school in Webster Groves, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb, but it was never a question of whether she would or wouldn’t open the bathroom.

And as time passed, the calls slowly began to subside, going from once a day, to once a week, to once a month.

Once the fear monger leave everything went back to normal and the same thing happened in other schools.

Although some state attorneys general and legislators have taken the federal government to court over its directive instructing all public school districts to allow transgender students to use restrooms that match their gender identity, school districts in those very states have quietly dealt with the issue with relative ease.
[…]
Atherton High School in Louisville, Kentucky, has had a policy in place for two years that allows transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, and Principal Thomas Aberli says there have been no problems.
[…]
“We have several transgender students now,” he said. “It’s just kind of a non-issue.”

It is the adults that have a problem, the students do not have a problem until adults come in and stir up trouble.

Nebraska’s Omaha.com reports that,

As the state’s largest and most diverse school district, Omaha Public Schools should lead the way and craft clear policies that protect transgender students, several community and school board members said Monday night.
[…]
The guidelines said students should be allowed to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond with their gender identity. It also addressed dress codes, student names and participation in sports.

But meanwhile state Board of Education had to add their two cents…

Earlier this month, a Nebraska State Board of Education resolution calling fore rejection of the federal guidance ended in a stalemate. The meeting drew emotional testimony from speakers who said schools have a responsibility to make vulnerable transgender students feel comfortable and speakers who worried about violating the privacy of other children, especially those who have experienced sexual abuse.

The OPS Board will hold another meeting on the 29th.

Then in Louisiana they are also tackling bathrooms.

Transgender issues, particularly bathrooms, uncharted territory for most Louisiana school administrators
The Advocate
By Charles Lussier
June 20, 2016

As state and federal leaders feud over whether transgender students should be able to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity, public educators in Louisiana say they are just beginning to grapple with an issue that is brand new to many of them.

Hollis Milton, superintendent for West Feliciana Parish and president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, said he cannot recall a time during his six years as a superintendent educating any transgender students in his small 2,100-student district north of Baton Rouge. And it’s not something he and his fellow superintendents had been talking about.
[…]
Not all react well. Some schools, she said, refuse to make any changes, including unwillingness to allow transgender students to go by their preferred name.

“In schools that have earnestly worked to fully accommodate transgender students, I’m not aware of any problems arising: no bathroom panics, no sports team problems, not anything,” Green said.

You would think that since they are in education that they would first learn about how trans policies in other school districts worked out, if they had any problems and how did they handle them instead of flying off the handle.

---

Right now I am over at the Plainville Senior Center for the LGBT Moveable Senior Center and today's activity is a game of miniature golf which I haven't played since I was knee high to a grasshopper.