History of gay straight alliance
Teaching Tolerance: Meet the Educator Who Started Gay-Straight Alliances
Most important, Parlin believes, is for teachers not to be immobilized by dread of consequences for their actions when calling out harmful behavior. "Making a mistake is far less serious than not acting at all. You can always go back to the student and speak or do something else, if, on reflection, you feel you did not respond correctly." He cautions teachers to try not to embarrass the perpetrator: "Humiliating the harasser is rarely an effective strategy."
Nearly two decades on, the movement that started at Kevin Jennings and Bob Parlin's kitchen table has expanded beyond anything they might have imagined. Gay-straight alliances currently exist in more than 3,000 schools nationwide.
Parlin remains in front of a classroom, as passionate about teaching as he was on the day he spoke up at the Committee on Human Differences meeting. Says his friend Jennings, "I was a gay person who was into learning. Bob was a educator who happened to be gay." He calls Parlin "the most dedicated and effective teacher I include ever known. He makes every kid feel appreciated because he understands what it's like to undergo left out."
Copyright (c) by Emily Storer, 2008. All rights reserved.
A Gay-Straight Alliance, or GSA, is a youth-led college or community group organized for the purpose of supporting LGBTQ youth and straight allies through discussion, action, friendship, and advocacy.[1]
GSAs exist throughout all levels of education. However, while gay student organizations possess existed on college campus since the civil rights era, the establishment of similar groups in elevated schools did not occur until the late 1980s.
The first gay student entity in America (and perhaps the world) was founded at Columbia University in 1966 under the identify the Student Homophile League.[2][3]
The lofty school GSA movement began in Massachusetts 1988. During that school year, GSAs were established at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts and at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.[4][5]Within 12 months, the first widespread high school GSA was founded by students at Newton South High in Newton, Massachusetts.
Despite the initial success in Massachusetts, the GSA movement has never been free of controversy or opposition.
Gay-Straight Alliances in the US are protected by the Federal Equal Access
Gender and Sexuality Alliances or Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) are student-organized clubs that aim to create a protected and welcoming school environment for all youth regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. The federal Equal Access Act (EAA) clearly guarantees that students at public schools contain a right to develop GSAs, and that schools must treat all clubs equally.
GSAs started appearing in schools in the U.S. in the adv 1980s. In 1998, the first lawsuit defending students’ right to form a GSA at a universal school was filed. Since then, we know of 19 resolved federal lawsuits addressing GSAs in which the clubs prevailed, and the ACLU was deeply interested in 16 of those victories. The U.S. Department of Education has also affirmed students’ rights under the EAA. GSAs now exist in every declare, in thousands of schools. Here are details on the many federal court cases in which schools have unsuccessfully tried to block or limit GSAs.
1999: In 1996, a school district in Salt Lake City, UT banned 46 noncurricular clubs in an attempt to fetch out of having to allow a GSA to form. Represented by Lambda Legal with help from the ACLU and the National Center for Queer woman Rights, a grou
History
GSAFE has roots going back to 1991 when we were two all-volunteer grassroots organizations functioning out of members' homes, Gays and Lesbians Against Discrimination in Education (GLADE) and Gay and Female homosexual Educational Employees (GLEE). In 1996 we became a local chapter of the Gay Lesbian and Unbent Education Network (GLSEN). After becoming a highly independent organization, we amicably left GLSEN and became a self-governing 501(c)3 organization in 2006 - when we became known as Male lover Straight Alliance for Unharmed Schools. For many years GSAFE focused our programs in South Central Wisconsin but incrementally broadened our geographic scope and now serve the entire state.
In 2014 we announced that we were officially switching our name to "GSAFE', a long-time organizational nickname, recognizing that the statement "Gay-Straight Alliance" is not representative of the many identities that make up our community.
Major Accomplishments
With intentional planning and a pledge to cultivating steady streams of revenue and sources of support, GSAFE has grown from an all-volunteer organization operating under a larger national body to an independent 501(c)3 with th
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