Harassment of gay student 1999

The alleged attack, never reported to school authorities, occurred in a storage building on school grounds. His house has been egged and draped with toilet paper. Petitioner filed suit against respondents, a county school board (Board) and school officials, seeking damages for the sexual harassment of her daughter LaShonda by G.

F., a fifth-grade classmate at a public elementary school. Verbal harassment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students is a serious problem in U.S. high schools and middle schools. Reis and others say that even the well-intentioned are sometimes afraid to address anti-gay bullying for fear they will be labeled gay themselves or accused by conservative parents of promoting homosexuality in schools.

Together with five other former students of Live Oak High School in this half country, half suburban town south of San Jose, she is suing the Morgan Hill Unified School District, claiming that teachers and administrators ignored pervasive anti-gay abuse.

When faculty or administrators are told of harassment or see it for themselves, the response is often inadequate, students and parents charge. They say the harassment is ignored or dismissed as teasing, or the targets are admonished that if they are openly gay, they have to expect such treatment.

In March, he says, he awakened and found the carcasses of a mutilated raccoon and a cat on his lawn and porch. As early as grade school, gay epithets and accusations of homosexuality are tossed with abandon at kids who are gay, thought to be gay or who are simply different or unpopular.

Two months ago, Ryan, founder of the Sierra High School gay-straight student group, quit school and took up independent studies at home. Emerging in the past five years, gay harassment suits and legislative efforts to ban discrimination in California schools are a reaction to a favorite, and at times remarkably ugly, form of student-on-student torment.

The study in which Reis was involved chronicled eight gang rapes of males and females in Washington. In an anonymous survey of Bay Area community college students conducted by a psychologist studying hate crimes, half the young men questioned admitted that they had engaged in anti-gay name calling, threats or physical violence.

He says a group of students knocked him down and kicked him repeatedly one day while he was walking home from school. Slurs were hissed at her in class, she says, scribbled on her locker and on pornographic death threats--including a picture of a bound and gagged woman with a slit throat.

In one of her math classes, a classmate openly harangued her with gay slurs and obscenities but the teacher did nothing, contends the suit, filed last year in U. The teacher denies hearing the anti-gay remarks, according to Davis. One-third of eleventh-grade students who responded to a.

The Cruelest of the :

One of several such actions filed around the nation, the lawsuit represents the latest frontier in school harassment issues--a legal front that gained ground this week when the U. Supreme Court ruled that school districts can be held liable in similar cases involving extensive sexual harassment of students by one another.

Flores is 20 now, the high school harassment behind her but hardly forgotten. One Fullerton teenager says she had her head shoved into a school toilet by a group of girls. But by many accounts, campus gay-baiting and bashing are more pronounced than ever, the flip side of the increasing profile of gay youth and homosexuality in general and the emergence of gay student support groups.

Flores is an outgoing, talkative young woman who was active in dance and drama at Live Oak. She won a scholarship to the California Institute of the Arts in SSValencia but turned it down, she says, because she was afraid of being hundreds of miles from her supportive family and feared encountering more harassment.

Anti-gay taunts are hardly new to schools. Emerging in the past five years, gay harassment suits and legislative efforts to ban discrimination in California schools are a reaction to a favorite, and at times remarkably ugly, form of.

She said she would try to get Flores another locker but never did, Flores recalls.