Joe Quigley, teacher - Part One, page 2

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Part One, page 2

Being the only committee member who had attended all the meetings, having different people at the third meeting was no surprise. A woman I had not seen before was sitting at the end of the conference table and asked what we had done so far. Obligingly I handed her the agenda for the meeting along with some of my papers, and filled her on on what had been discussed.

It must be remembered that if the discussions went as they should there was a very good possibility that people might say things that after a little education they might regret saying and wish for the opportunity to take back, and that for many committee members these initial meetings may have been the first time they said the words "Gay" and "Lesbian" out loud, or even talked with someone they knew was Gay. Because of this awkwardness, the meetings, although not being secret, were not open to the general public. It was a kind of rational courtesy.

The chair entered the room as it slowly filled, and to my surprise did not recognize the woman I had just spoken with, which took me aback a little as I assumed it was one of the people he had chosen to be on the committee. He asked her to identify herself whereupon she introduced herself as a reporter for the Daily Oklahoman (the local highly conservative, anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-Gay, pro-Republican, Christian-fundamentalist daily newspaper).

The committee members, along with some other teachers who were present for a meeting the chair intended to dovetail into ours, watched as the chair emphatically cancelled the meeting. He was upset that the closed meeting was now public, announced that he was only the chair because he had been told to do so by someone over him, that he really did not want to do it, and that meetings were only held because of a concern one person had presented to his superior.

Meeting cancelled. Committee disbanded. But, not before the chair spoke to the reporter saying among other things that he could not continue as committee chair because of personal, political and religious beliefs, and that I, in spite of never having had the chance to address the committee or answer their questions, was forcing the committee in a particular direction and was determined to turn the committee's work into a "Gay Issue".

At the board's next meeting I once again spoke, this time to show how state and local school policies made it mandatory that Gay and Lesbian students be acknowledged and their needs met in spite of any individual's personal, political or religious beliefs, and to respectfully request that if in the future an official of the district wished to represent my goals and motivations to the press it be done correctly, truthfully and without misrepresentation.

A requested "cooling off" period which I assumed and hoped would be of short duration began soon after. On the anniversary of the date of my original request for relevant inservices, after a series of correspondence, I was informed that in spite of the appointment of a new chair, future meetings would have to be placed in Limbo until time and schedules allowed.

The wait would last until the fall of that year, 1998.

* xx* * xx* *

Every fall, just before students return, the law firm hired by the district to see it through it's legal difficulties goes over those court rulings that might have a bearing on the upcoming school year.

A case in Fayetville, Arkansas extended Title IX sexual discrimination protection to Gay and Lesbian students, and in the case of Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Services Inc. the Supreme Court made same-sex sexual harassment suits possible.

If the district was to enjoy any protection in these cases, blissful ignorance would be their only way.

Among the reports and studies, I had included in the school board's packets a press release about the case of Jamie Nabozny from Wisconsin who had successfully sued his local school district because nothing was done about the verbal and physical harassment he constantly faced as a Gay teen. In my correspondence throughout the previous year, as well in future ones, I reminded the district about the possible litigation that a student could initiate against the district if it insisted on doing nothing. They did not have the luxury of ignorance.

During the cooling off period a new chairperson was appointed to the diversity committee, which in the beginning made no major difference as the committee's work did not seem to be of any great importance, and administrators' schedules kept meetings in the realm of the impossible. However, as a result of the meeting with the attorneys and the revelation that the district possessed information that I had been supplying, the district was directed to cover itself by including a warning about protecting Gay and Lesbian students from sexual harassment when the topic of Title IX was treated in staff development.

Because of the new rulings the district required each school to have a staff inservice on Title IX so that no one intentionally or otherwise put the district in the position to be sued.

"Recently there have been same-sex sexual harassment complaints. And, more and more we have to realize that among our children there are some of them who have not determined, fully, their sexuality, and there are some of our children that may be Gay. Regardless of what you think, let me tell you one thing that is an imperative. Those children must be protected. If we don't pay attention and protect those children we are in violation of their rights under Title IX, and we could be liable."

This statement was made at the inservice held at my school that November, and it was given by the adminstrator who had previously been the diversity committee chair. After having dissolved the diversity committee the previous year his administrative duties had been changed thus removing him from the possibility of being the committee chair again, and by coincidence, perhaps totally by accident, put him in the position to be the person whose duty it was to go to each school to explain the sexual harassment policy of the district to the faculty and staff.

A drag queen who emceed the Friday night show at the Wreck Room had become interested in my work with the district, and had asked me on more than one occaision to speak for a few minutes during her show about what was happening in the district. Usually I had only frustrating news, but now I could go before the audience that I was never totally convinced appreciated a serious interruption to their fun evening to read the statement about the protection of Gay and Lesbian students from sexual harassment in the schools. At the end of the reading of the statement the audience rose and clapped.

Not long after this a second diversity committee was instituted. Whereas the first committee was assigned to the Directer of Curriculum, this new committee was assigned to a new department, Human Relations/Minority Student Affairs, and its new Director, the former head of Curriculum.

And so it was the old chairperson became the new one as well.

This new committee was a little more receptive to its responsibility. It consisted of principals, heads of various ethnic and racial minority student departments such as African-American and Hispanic-American Student Services and a few teachers like myself. At each meeting the members were eager to do what needed to be done, and when I referred to "my constituency" in general terms I was asked to be more specific, only to be surprised how receptive the committee was to the inclusion of Gay and Lesbian students in the district's policies.

Instead of a repeat of the first meeting, when I asked whether nor not these students would be included, the chair assured us that, as they were Americans who had just as much right to Constitutional protections as anyone else, Gay and Lesbian Students would, of course, be included. The committee also was insistent on this as to leave them out by name would leave their inclusion up to the individual attitudes of teachers which was not as supportive as one would hope.

As work progressed and the committee members were pleased with the progress and its swiftness, a wrench was thrown in when, in workshop fashion, one meeting consisted of one of those annoying group activities that uses index cards and butcher paper hung on walls for group reports when it was the feeling of most involved that we were far beyond that point. It was seen as a stall and a way to avoid having the actual language to present to the Board before the end of the school year.

In anticipation of this and due to the general impression that a stall was put into effect, the question was asked about what we would do if we began the year without the actual language, but wanted to celebrate diversity in our classrooms. We were told our job was not necessarily the invention of a policy, but, rather, the fine tuning of the existing one, and if questioned, or if something we did was met with objection, we could point out that we were doing what we were in the spirit of the policy and its, if not specified, implied inclusiveness.

I submitted proposed language for a diversity policy and procedures for implementing it, and this was used as a starting point for discussion.

By May we were working on the actual language. The impression remained that somewhere in the process there was a deliberate move to slow the process down so that there would actually be no language to present to the Board at year's end. At the final meeting held that May the chair expressed some reluctance to include the words "sexual orientation" in the diversity policy based on his belief that when the wording was presented to the board they would automatically turn down the policy. It was a political thing. An elementary school principal found this unacceptable, explaining that we had been assigned the task of rewriting the diversity policy, and because of this it was our job to spell out exactly what the district was expected to do. Anything less was unacceptable. Further, it was imperative that if this was the mind set of the board, then it was up to them to state publicly not only their objection and their reason for it, but also make it known that there was a segment of the population which they chose to abandon. There was a plea to seek compromise which consisted of omitting any reference to Gay and Lesbian Students in order to have the diversity language accepted, and somewhere down the road try to have these students added.

Was this not what we had been doing?

Because we were heading into summer break, the chair suggested that he take all the work we had done, organize it into a neat summary, and after the summer months when we reconvened we would finalize our work. Filled with suspicion, and having no other choice, we adjourned, suspecting our work was effectively halted and nothing would come of it.

The summer passed, the chair was once again reassigned to different duties, and the committee was not to reconvene.

TO BE CONTINUED

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