Stick figure drawings of families

Credit: Courtesy of Tarah Fleming, Our Family Coalition

Drawings in a Berkeley Unified School Commune classroom in 2014. The district was recognized for welcoming all families past the Welcoming Schools project of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.

When the U.S. Supreme Courtroom issued a major civil rights determination on marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, striking down a state police banning interracial marriage, Alameda Unified teacher Gene Kahane was a 3rd-grader in Richmond, California, and didn't hear well-nigh it. News of social change travels faster and farther at present – and nigh immediately into the classroom.

Across California and the nation, educators say the Supreme Court conclusion legalizing same-sex activity matrimony stands to ameliorate, over time, the style gay and lesbian people are talked most at schools, both in the hallways and in the curriculum.

"That decision was heard everywhere," said Kahane, an Alameda Unified School District loftier schoolhouse English teacher and commune-identified marry for gay youth.

"I think nosotros've crossed a threshold toward acceptance and welcome," said Todd Savage, president of the National Association of School Psychologists.

Savage and other educators said the ruling volition give new momentum to efforts to brand schools safer and more inclusive for gay, lesbian and transgender students, besides as the more than than 200,000 schoolchildren nationwide – including at least 30,000 in California – who have same-sex parents.

Sara Train, coordinator of the Los Angeles LGBT Centre'south Project Spin, which works with the Los Angeles Unified Schoolhouse Commune to end bullying, said the ruling is "a path to equality" for gay and lesbian people and "a validation" that volition affect school civilization.

"I think we've crossed a threshold toward acceptance and welcome," said Todd Savage, president of the National Association of School Psychologists.

She referenced the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy in the June 26 Obergefell v. Hodges determination in favor of the right to marry for gay and lesbian couples. "They ask for equal nobility in the eyes of the police force," he wrote. "The Constitution grants them that right."

And she praised the words of President Barack Obama, who called the ruling "a victory for the children whose families will now be recognized equally equal to any other." Obama referred to the struggles of gay, lesbian and transgender individuals who were able to "endure bullying and taunts" and "slowly made an entire land realize that love is love."

Train said, "The idea of any LGBT person beingness a second-class citizen, and non having rights, respect and equal handling, is now debunked." At schools, she said, hostility will be tolerated less.

"The ruling is going to brand it that much easier for adults in schools to experience OK in talking about LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) topics and families," said Johanna Eager, director of the Welcoming Schools projection of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which provides diversity training to school staff, including those in Oakland and Berkeley. "It gives a legitimacy to having these conversations."

California has been in the forefront of efforts to update school curriculum to include the gay and lesbian political movement as well as gay individuals and families. The Off-white Education Act, or Senate Beak 48, constructive in 2012, called for inclusion of topics related to gay and lesbian people as well equally disabled individuals. The police force also reiterated the state ban on classroom instruction that promotes discrimination on the footing of sexual orientation.

But the promise of the Fair Teaching Human activity has yet to be realized, Kahane and others said. Widespread inclusion of gay discipline affair has stalled while the state revises its social studies and history curriculum framework, the extensive grade-by-grade curriculum guide for instruction the state standards. Revision of the framework began in 2009, paused for vi years during the economical downturn and is again underway. The country no longer officially adopts history textbooks only instead approves of textbooks that school districts select.

As the timeline for the revision unfolds, Laura Kanter, manager of youth programs at the LGBT Center OC in Santa Ana, said the matrimony decision should ensure the gay civil rights movement a identify in classes about the workings of the Supreme Court, the Constitution and social change.

"This conclusion is being lifted up every bit 1 of the near of import civil rights decisions in our history," said Kanter, who is a member of the school climate committee for the Santa Ana Unified School Commune. "I don't think people tin can get away with education history or regime without talking virtually this."

Books and materials that reverberate the updated framework are likely to be on the shelves by autumn 2017, said Bill Honig, vice chairman of the country Instructional Quality Commission. In the meantime, private teachers are integrating gay and lesbian experiences into history, social studies and English language classes, also as elementary school readings and conversations virtually families. Students who see themselves reflected in the curriculum are more engaged in learning, enquiry has found.

Hours after the Supreme Court decision, Welcoming Schools and the National Instruction Association issued "Who Can Marry Whom?" – a two-page guide to help educators talk virtually marriage equality.

At the One Athenaeum Foundation in Los Angeles, a repository of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender materials, staff members and volunteers scurried to collect copies of newspapers and magazines that appear the ruling – artifacts that will become primary source materials for students of the gay and lesbian equality movement, said Jamie Scot, project manager for I Archives. Scot immediately updated a visual timeline of gay and lesbian history, used in some high schools, to include a new entry for June 26, 2015, headlined "Dear Wins."

And Kahane, a member of Alameda Unified's LGBTQ Round Table, an informational group, received an email from a student celebrating the court decision and thanking him for creating a safety setting for classroom discussions of gay-themed literature. Such works included "The Hours," past Michael Cunningham, a fictional account of the life of author Virginia Woolf that includes a gay male narrator. The student was glad that the literature had not generated "an ugly response," Kahane said.

California has been a national leader in protecting gay, lesbian and transgender students from harm through legislation known as Seth'southward Police force or Assembly Nib 9, effective in 2012, which strengthened anti-bullying laws. But attitudes in schools haven't always kept stride, according to a 2022 survey of 888 California lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender high school students by the Gay, Lesbian and Direct Pedagogy Network, an Oakland-based national advocacy group.

Of the students surveyed, 90 pct reported hearing "gay" used in a negative mode and eighty percent reported regularly hearing homophobic remarks from other students. 20-four pct said they regularly heard school staff making negative remarks most how masculine, feminine or gender-befitting a person was.

Nationwide, students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender report higher incidents of mental health bug, including feeling deplorable and wanting to harm themselves, than heterosexual students, according to a 2022 report of more than than 72,000 adolescents published in the American Journal of Public Health. The report plant that 23 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender youth had attempted suicide in the year prior to being surveyed, compared with 6.half dozen percent of heterosexual youth.

But that disparity nearly disappears in schools that create positive environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students, co-ordinate to a carve up 2022 written report published in the American Journal of Public Wellness. Supportive school climates were identified by factors that included the presence of Gay-Direct Alliance groups, anti-harassment policies, relevant trainings for staff, and curriculum on gay-related topics.

The process can take time.

"I've become more patient about some of the problems," Kahane said. Some teachers, particularly at the elementary school level, are "fearful of pushback from parents," he said. Merely for him, he said, "This piece of work has been a privilege."

To get more reports like this one, click hither to sign upwardly for EdSource'southward no-cost daily email on latest developments in educational activity.