txtriangle

By Jone Devlin

HOUSTON — In a landmark initiative this past April, Houston Independent School district required every principal and at least one vice principal from each school in HISD to attend a two-hour training workshop addressing the rights of gay and lesbian students and the responsibilities of school officials to insure their safety on campus.

The workshop was held as part of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) “Healing the Hurt Conference” and included testimony by Derek Henkle, a young man from Reno, Nevada. During his time in high school, Henkle was physically attacked and/or threatened every single day while teachers and administrators either looked the other way. These school district employees also told him he was a troublemaker and it was his own fault that kids picked on him.

While excitement about the training was (and is) high, many also agreed that such training must actually be put into effect before it can do some good. It was in that spirit that School Board Trustee Esther Campos proposed adding “sexual orientation” to HISD’s Student Code of Conduct. The Student Code of Conduct is a standard set by HISD Administrators that prohibits harassment on school campus’s targeting race, religion, national origin, or disability.

“It just seems like all other provisions that have to do with protecting individual rights,” Campos said. “The Student code spells out pretty much all of them.” Campos said she then became aware of what she believed to be an omission.

Following some discussion, several board members agreed with Campos. “They weren’t really aware that it wasn’t there but felt that the phrase ‘sexual orientation’ should be in the item dealing with harassment,” she said.

Despite support from the school board and others, Campos had reason for concern. It seems that when she received her new meeting agenda on Monday her motion to add sexual orientation to the Student Code of Conduct wasn’t included. Campos called various administrators trying to find out why the motion wasn’t listed on the current agenda, but no calls had been returned as of press time.

This is worrisome to Campos because the lack of an Administrative recommendation means “we’ll have to battle it out at the table. But maybe it won’t be a battle because I know we need a code of student conduct, I know that it gives everyone, students, teachers, parents and administrators, a common language to deal with in the school setting.”

Campos also expressed astonishment that the addition of sexual orientation to the code should cause any controversy.

“I can’t understand why anyone would shy away from including this in the provision because it protects all children,” she said. “I don’t understand how people would object to it in this day and time.” Campos also noted that she didn’t understand why discussion of her motion was omitted in the first place, and why the support wasn’t there initially when the motion was first brought up (the motion was tabled at the last board meeting).

Jim Null, who is the Education Committee Chair for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), is planning to attend Thursday’s meeting and make comments in support of the measure. His speech, which he has timed to fit the three-minute time frame he will be given to the second, quotes statistics from the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) among others.

According to some of the GLSEN data on gay students that Null has compiled for the meeting:

- 84% heard remarks such as “faggot” or “dyke” frequently at school

- 24% heard similar remarks from faculty or school staff at least some of the time

- 83% personally had been verbally harassed at school

- 65% had been sexually harassed

- 42% had been physically harassed

- 21% had been assaulted

- 69% felt unsafe in their school because of their sexual orientation

In closing Campos talked about how she herself had been “called names” in the past based on her ethnicity, as had her children. She talked about how hard that is, and reiterated that in this day and age, “I thought we were beyond that kind of thing.”

Campos spoke, too, about how important it was for the community to contact other board members to try and drum up support for her motion, saying that she’d had a lot of emails of support from the community, but was only “one-person, one vote.” She asked that those who had contacted her please contact their representatives as well, so that those representatives would be encouraged to vote with Campos on Thursday.

“I don’t have any other ulterior motive other than to treat each one with respect and to expect the children to do the same thing,” Campos concluded. “That’s all I’m asking.”

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