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(Ashland, Kentucky) The American Civil Liberties Union
asked a federal judge on Wednesday to reopen a lawsuit it brought two years ago on behalf of
several students who had sought to form a gay-straight alliance at Boyd
County High School.
In a motion filed today, the ACLU points to
failures by the school district to keep up its end of the agreement to provide a
mandatory training focused on sexual orientation and gender identity
discrimination.
"The Boyd County Board of Education agreed to take specific steps in
settling this lawsuit, because it knew that anti-gay harassment is rampant in
its schools," said Sharon McGowan, a staff attorney with the ACLU's Lesbian
and Gay Rights Project.
"But this school district's attempts at
providing a training have been laughably inadequate gestures that show no real
commitment to honoring the agreement or protecting its students."
Last year's settlement agreement came a few months after Judge David Bunning of
the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky issued a
preliminary injunction against the school for blocking formation of the GSA. (story)
In
that ruling, the judge noted several examples of harassment in the school,
including students in an English class stating that they needed to "take
all the fucking faggots out in the back woods and kill them."
Part of the settlement agreement called for the school district to conduct a
mandatory anti-harassment training for all district staff as well as all
students in high school and middle school. In papers filed today with
the court, the ACLU outlined the district's failings in meeting the spirit of
this agreement:
The school, the ACLU says, has allowed students to "opt out" of what was supposed to be a
mandatory training session, letting half the student body skip the training. At
the high school, only 502 of the 965 students attended the training, and at the
middle school, only 462 of the 730 students attended. The only
consequence for those students who "opted out" was a slap on the
wrists - they received a single unexcused absence, making them ineligible to get
perfect attendance for the school year.
Although the school agreed to conduct a one-hour training focused on sexual
orientation and gender identity discrimination for all middle and high school
students, the training video the school showed to students to satisfy this
requirement included barely 10 minutes' worth of content that directly addressed
these issues.
"Officials at Boyd County know that they've failed in the past to provide a
safe school environment for their lesbian and gay students, and they committed
in the settlement agreement to take specific steps to stop the harassment,"
said Lili Lutgens, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Kentucky. "We
intend to hold the Boyd County Board of Education accountable for holding up its
end of the agreement and making a genuine effort to protect its students from
harassment and harm."
The motion to reopen Boyd County High School Gay Straight Alliance v. Board of
Education of Boyd County, Kentucky was filed in Covington with the United States
District Court of the Eastern District of Kentucky.
©365Gay.com 2005
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