Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [104]
the development of collections of educational literature, videos, and films, and their wide publicizing via displays, posters, and so on.
Significantly, the state board steered clear of a fifth recommendation addressing the need to revamp the curriculum to incorporate gay issues. It was a strategic decision that made sense, since curriculum “tampering” hits the hot button of the Christian right as well as middle-of-the-road parents.
David LaFontaine, who was named chair of the governor’s gay-youth commission, told the New York Times: “The approach we’re taking in Massachusetts is very different from the…Rainbow Curriculum. If we had tried to force a particular curriculum on the school system, I think the results would have been disastrous.”
He later told me, “We’ve taken control of the issue. We reached millions and put a human face on the suffering of gay and lesbian youth. People realized their own child could be involved. We took the high road, making it clear that we are taxpayers and our public schools were shirking their responsibility. We merely insisted that they live up to their obligations.”
By skirting the curriculum issue, the Weld administration could aggressively implement the fairness and safety provisions.
And it did. Weld personally launched a series of fifteen regional workshops in the fall of 1993 to train educators to oversee teams of parents, students, school personnel, and community representatives in each participating school. Involvement was voluntary, but within the next six months 143 of the state’s 300 high schools signed on. “Every student,” Weld said, “is entitled to pursue an education…that is safe and free of discrimination, abuse, and harassment. The concept of schools as safe havens must apply to all students, including gay and lesbian teenagers.”
Such an extraordinarily open and visible commitment to so volatile an issue by a state chief executive was unprecedented. (Weld easily won reelection in 1994.)
The state dubbed its implementation program the Massachusetts Safe Schools Program for Gay and Lesbian Students and charged it with providing resources to help local units develop a host of activities. Its menu included:
grants of up to two thousand dollars per school for student-developed programs and support groups such as gay-straight alliances (now existing in thirty high schools); video, film, theater, and photography programs; field trips; conferences; and so on;
contracts with a network of mental-health providers to counsel gay and lesbian students and their families, and to develop plans for the internal training of school counselors;
on-site faculty and staff training in violence and suicide prevention;
resource guides for students and families to mental and physical health services, crisis lines, and so on.
If it lives up to its promise, the Safe Schools Program could have a long-range impact beyond measure. Nowhere else in the country had such a comprehensive and inclusive approach been integrated into the body of school policy. (The city of Seattle recently held a series of public hearings on a program modeled after that of Massachusetts.)
A second development, perhaps more impressive than the first, moved along a parallel track in Massachusetts during 1993. The state had been one of eight nationwide to declare discrimination against gays illegal. But the state’s legislation excluded people under eighteen. To repair that exclusion, the Student Advisory Council, a statewide network of more than seven hundred students, filed a bill with the state outlawing discrimination against gay and lesbian students in public schools.
The bill was bottled up in committee for two years. Then, as the Safe Schools Program was gearing up in the summer and fall of 1993, gay youth activists felt the climate was right. They unleashed a drive to dislodge the legislation and get it passed. At the heart of the campaign was a cadre of hundreds of gay and heterosexual high school students who descended on the state capitol to lobby legislators, hold