The official, Kevin Jennings, says he should have handled the situation differently when he told the boy he hoped he had used a condom during a sexual encounter with an older man.

Jennings, who now heads the department’s Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, has been under fire from conservatives and right-wing groups for not reporting the incident to authorities or to the boy’s parents.

In a statement Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Jennings has devoted his career to promoting school safety.

“He is uniquely qualified for his job, and I am honored to have him on our team,” Duncan said.

Jennings was teaching high school in Concord, Mass., in 1988 when a sophomore boy confessed of an involvement with an older man in Boston.

Telling the story a dozen years later, Jennings described how the boy told of meeting the man in a bus station bathroom and going home with him. Jennings said he told the boy, “My best friend had just died of AIDS the week before. You know, I hope you knew to use a condom.” Jennings was speaking during a conference of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which he founded.

Conservative psychology professor Warren Throckmorton unearthed an audiotape of Jennings’ comments to the conference and posted it on his Web site recently.

In the Education Department statement Wednesday, Jennings said, “21 years later, I can see how I should have handled the situation differently.

“I should have asked for more information and consulted medical or legal authorities,” he said. “Teachers back then had little training and guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers.”

The department noted that Jennings has won honors from groups including the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Association of Independent Schools, the National Education Association and the Massachusetts Counselors Association.

Some NEA members protested their organization’s award to Jennings.

“We may not bring people closer physically – but we will in every other way,” Glick said. “We want to make them feel more confident about who they are.”

Glick started working on the website, which will be called the GLBTQ Online High School, in order to reach students who live in rural areas that do not have access to many resources.

While Glick argues that this online school would protect students from bullying and act as a safe-haven, many fear that they will simply be further isolated from their peers.

“The danger of the online high school is that kids will stay isolated and feel uncared for,” said David Johnson, a social psychology teacher at the University of Minnesota. “It would be much better to have these kids in a regular high school.”

Others, such as Glick and Curt Johnson, disagree and believe students gain a closer relationship with their teachers online due to increased interaction.

“The individual transactions of e-mailing and telephoning regularly creates a relationship between students and teachers,” said Johnson, a managing partner at Education Evolving, a joint venture of the Center for Policy Studies and Hamline University that promotes technological progress in schools.

Through the use of videos, chats, graphics and other multimedia, and occasional phone calls, teachers on the online high school will teach a more “GLBT-friendly” curriculum that highlights importance figures in gay rights history.

Visit the GLBTQ Online High School’s website here to find out more information.

The resolutions say that the organization opposes the “discriminatory treatment of same-sex couples and its belief that such couples should have the same legal rights and benefits as similarly-situated heterosexual couples.” They also call for the “passage of a federal statute prohibiting federal discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity and expression.” The NEA also committed itself to supporting the enactment of LGBT equality at local, state and federal levels.

The NEA falls short of asking for gay marriage – instead, it says:

“NEA does not believe that a single term must be used to designate this legally recognized “equal treatment” relationship, and recommends that each state decide for itself whether “marriage,” “civil union,” “domestic partnership,” or some other term is most appropriate based upon the cultural, social, and religious values of its citizenry.”

The National Education Association is the nation’s largest professional employee organization with over 3.2 million members. Members work at every level of education — from pre-school to university graduate programs.

Read the resolutions yourself, under “New Business Item E.”

The Family Research Council has launched a website aimed at removing Kevin Jennings from his appointment as head of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools at the Department of Education.

You can check it out here: www.stopjennings.org.

I don’t have to tell you, it’s pretty vicious.

The Family Research Council’s beef with Jennings has a little something to do with (wait for it…) his homosexuality. Jennings is the founder of GLSEN – The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, an organization for students, parents and teachers that works to make school environments safer for LGBT students. (GSLEN started the Day of Silence, which has been embraced by schools across the country.)

Here’s FRC’s Pete Sprigg on why Jennings should be ousted:

“Jennings and the organization he founded have been the leaders in promoting a pro-homosexual agenda in America’s schools, beginning in kindergarten. His positions are extreme and narrow-minded, his rhetoric harsh and hate-filled, and his qualifications and ethical standards questionable at best.”

Their campaign goes on to pull out-of-context quotes from Jennings’ memoir, “Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son,” to paint him as a drug-using, God-hating, radical queer aiming to turn everyone on the planet gay before Labor Day. (For a nice compare-contrast of the quotes, check out Good As You’s analysis here.

If there’s one line of attack in anti-gay rhetoric that I hate the most, it’s the line that paints gay men and women as a threat to children – in the classroom, in the home, on the street, wherever the homophobes imagine we will be. It’s the line that gets hauled anytime the opposition wants to land a particularly low blow, one that reaches past logic and factual record into a purely emotional, purely personal place.

Threaten the safety of children, and you get a lot of people’s attention.

What I find particularly abhorrent about the FRC attack on Jennings is the idea that, by virtue of his homosexuality, he is unfit to know what’s best for children. Forget that his life’s work has been devoted to the safety of children, to the creation of safe spaces for all students, to the prevention of bullying.

Forget all of that. He’s gay. Which means he’s a danger.

I don’t think we’ve done the best job fighting this particular line of rhetoric. We seem to get wrapped up pretty quickly in other, sexier issues like DADT and marriage equality. And while those are absolutely important issues to deal with, this notion – with all its insidious tentacled reach among those in the Religious Right – demands our attention, demands our anger, demands our action.

Because that notion strikes at the core of what the anti-gay crowd believes about us, what they hang their attacks on: we are fundamentally the opposite of Good.

Good, to them, is heterosexuality. And so for us to be something other than heterosexual means we opt out of all the other Goods as well (this is, of course, a radically reductive view of human nature, but the Religious Right isn’t so good with shades of grey). If we’re gay we must, by extension, reject God, reject Family, reject Morality, reject the Welfare of Children – all of the capital letter Goods that make up Traditional Family Values.

We know the truth of the matter: that those values exist in our lives as well. Most of us practice those values every day and some of us practice those values in front of a classroom of students, like Jennings.

No amount of legislation will reduce the power of that rhetoric in the minds of those who know little to nothing about the reality of our lives. Marriage equality tomorrow will not make this FRC attack on Jennings less successful to their target audience.

What will reduce the power of the rhetoric? An embrace of this current historical moment as a teachable moment.

Because it is. Our lives – our simple, boring, sometimes complicated and average lives – are now, more than ever, our greatest asset in fighting the rhetoric of the FRC. We need to be more than activists. We need to be teachers.

Success legislatively in pursuit of equality is tempered by the problem of social acceptance. It’s an ugly fact, but a fact nonetheless. And we can’t expect the social tides to change simply because the legal ones do. So with one eye on activism, we should train the other on individual advocacy – being out, taking the time to correct someone who uses a gay slur in public, start a blog (seriously, go start one. Tell your story. What could it hurt?), demonstrate in every small way the reality of gay men and women – we can be gay and moral, we can be gay and ethical, we can be gay and good role models, we can be gay and be a good teacher.

You can’t learn what you aren’t taught. So, teachers we must become.

Randi Weingarten, who is an open lesbian and led the New York teachers union since 1998, was elected president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers last July.

The 51-year-old labor leader said recently that it’s no secret the two jobs were weighing on her. But until Wednesday, she would not confirm her intention to step down, despite rumors circulating since last week.

Effective July 31, Weingarten will devote her full time to the organization that is the most prominent national advocate for teachers, often dealing with Congress and the White House.

On Wednesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Weingarten “has been a big part of many of the reforms we have implemented over the past seven years – and a big part of the incredible turnaround our schools have made.”

Repeatedly re-elected to the union presidency by wide margins, Weingarten fought to increase teacher salaries and improve training. In 2007, she negotiated a contract that gave teachers bonuses if student test scores rose.

She also has advocated smaller class sizes, linked to rebuilding and repairing schools.

As head of the 200,000-member UFT, Weingarten “has been a tireless advocate for public education in New York,” said New York Gov. David Paterson, who called her “an innovative leader, a no-nonsense reformer, a tough negotiator.”

A graduate of Cornell University and Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, she taught history at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn from 1991 to 1997.

Weingarten then became president of the union that represents active and retired members including teachers, guidance counselors, psychologists, social workers and nurses.

The union’s executive board will select someone to fill out the remainder of her term until elections are held next spring.

Weingarten also is a vice president of the national AFL-CIO, and has served as chairwoman of the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York and head of the Municipal Labor Committee that represents about 365,000 unionized New York employees.

“When it comes to labor leaders, Randi is the gold standard,” said Denis Hughes, president of the New York State AFL-CIO. “She knows how to bring people together, forge consensus and most importantly, get things done.”

The lawsuit cites the cancellation of a student production of “Rent” over its gay characters and a Facebook video in which football players at the school threaten a female student.

Court papers filed by the ACLU in Orange County Superior Court run 36 pages, claiming discrimination at the school violates federal and state equal protection provisions.

“School and district officials, through their action and inaction, have not only failed to take steps to address this hostile environment, but they have contributed to it and given sanction to it,” the suit alleges.

The Newport-Mesa Unified School District said the lawsuit contains factual errors. 

In the video three members of the football team threaten to rape and kill the teenage girl.  The ACLU claims the school did little to punish the teen player or to protect the girl – even after her parents repeatedly expressed concerns about her safety.

In February, drama advisor Ron Martin complained that principal Fal Asrani ordered him to drop “Rent” because of its gay characters. The play was reinstated later in the month following media coverage of the controversy.

The lawsuit alleges that homophobia is rampant at the school.  It complains that teachers and student use gay slurs and quotes one student as saying the principal voiced opposition to gay marriage during an English class.

The ACLU is seeking damages, a filing process at the school for discrimination complaints, the establishment of diversity training for staff and students and a schoolwide survey of attitudes towards sexism and homophobia.

The homophobic harassment and bullying at the school typifies a rise in hostility toward LGBT students throughout California in the wake of the divisive campaign over Proposition 8, which eliminated the right of lesbians and gay men to marry, the ACLU said in a statement.

“The threats, intimidation and slurs directed toward students on the basis of gender and sexual orientation at Corona del Mar High School are part of a growing sexist and homophobic environment there that school administrators could have – and should have – stopped,” said Hector Villagra, director of the Orange County office of the ACLU. 

“Instead, these school officials amplified the hostile atmosphere by sending the message that the harassers can act with impunity, and by telling students who were the targets of threats and bullying that they would have to find ways to avoid it.”

The House of Representatives K-12 Subcommittee took up the bill this week, deciding Wednesday to send the measure for more study.

A similar bill died in committee last year.

“Teachers should neither be promoting nor speaking against homosexuality,” said Rep. Stacey Campfield (R), the bill’s sponsor.

“They should not talk about it all,” Campfield said. “Leave it up to families to talk about it.”

The Tennessee Equality Project, the Tennessee Education Association and the American Civil Liberties Union all oppose the bill. Critics say it would stifle free speech.

“The problem with this bill is it would have a chilling effect on even being able to discuss the bill itself, and both sides of the bill, in an 8th grade class where you are learning to write essays,” said Chris Sanders of the Tennessee Equality Project.

If the law were to pass, opponents say that teachers could be prohibited from even mentioning the fact that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people exist. But it is not clear what would happen if a student asked a question about homosexuality or gay issues in class.

Last year, the K-9 subcommittee referred the bill to the state Department of Education for further study – a move designed to kill the measure.

Campfield reintroduced it this year.

Tennessee already bans same-sex marriage through a constitutional amendment and in addition to the gag bill, the legislature this year is considering a bill that would ban gay couples from adopting children.

With Republicans now in control of both houses in the Tennessee legislature GOP lawmakers say they are confident of passing both the gag and adoption bills this year.

The scholarship was announced Tuesday by the Point Foundation in partnership with Jeffrey Fashion Cares. It will begin in the 2009/2010 academic year.

“It is an honor to create a scholarship in the name of a young man who, from what I’ve read, showed so much promise and was a light for many around him,” said Jorge Valencia, Executive Director & CEO of Point Foundation. 

Point Foundation is the nation’s largest scholarship-granting organization for LGBT students of merit. It provides financial support, leadership training and mentoring to students who are marginalized because of their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression. 

Point provides its scholars with the financial ability to attend the nation’s foremost higher educational institutions.

“JFC’s involvement with the Point Foundation stemmed directly from the senseless murder of Lawrence. The Lawrence King/Jeffrey Fashion Cares Point Scholarship was set up to ensure that this young man’s memory and the crime would not be forgotten,” said Dan Rothmann, co-chair of JFC events.

“We hope that this scholarship raises awareness of the daily discrimination faced by our LGBT youths in our nation’s schools,” added Co-chair Todd Sears.

Jeffrey Fashion Cares is one of the nation’s most unique annual events – supporting 4 organizations and raising millions of dollars. Ninety percent of the money raised goes directly to the non profits who impact LGBT and HIV issues. The organizations are Lambda Legal, GMHC, Hetrick-Martin Institute, and Point Foundation. 

A fellow student, Brandon McInerney, has been charged with murder and will be tried as an adult.

King often dressed in a feminine manner and told friends that he was gay. Twenty horrified students were in the classroom at the time of the shooting.

The teen was rushed to hospital. He died after doctors declared him brain dead and his mother agreed to have life-support removed.