Eleven years after Morgan Hill’s landmark gay rights case
received national attention, the school district is out from under
the watchful eyes of the American Civil Liberties Union and will
cease its anti-discrimination program.
District out from under the ACLU
Eleven years after Morgan Hill’s landmark gay rights case received national attention, the school district is out from under the watchful eyes of the American Civil Liberties Union and will cease its anti-discrimination program.
The district implemented the “Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity” program in 2006/07, giving one to two hours of staff training on the rights of persons of all sexual orientations. Additionally, seventh and ninth graders received a 45-minute lesson on anti-discrimination.
Now that the settlement mandate has ended, the district no longer has to give an annual report on the program to the ACLU and won’t train seventh and ninth graders, but administrators at each school will highlight the page in the student handbook that discusses gender discrimination, Assistant Superintendent of Human Resources Jay Totter said. That’s a bad idea.
Students wanted improved training
In 1998, Alana Flores and five other district students filed a lawsuit against the Morgan Hill Unified School District for damages and improved training for personnel and students. They said ongoing harassment of students presumed to be gay went unpunished by school officials. The district settled in the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2004, agreeing to train staff and students and paying the six students $1.1 million total. The testifying students in the original case said that, between 1991 and 1998, school district employees at Live Oak High School, Britton and Martin Murphy middle schools repeatedly ignored or minimized many reports by the students that they were being abused by others who thought they were gay.
Program should continue
During the past several years, the district monitored incidences of discrimination based on sexual orientation, and found that during the 2009/09 school year, 214 were reported, up 33 percent over the previous year’s 161, according to district documents. Totter said that the district assumed there would be some increase since the district had 150 new students this year, about a 1.7 percent increase over last year. But a 1.7 percent increase in students should not lead to a 33 percent increase in incidents. Board President Don Moody said he believed the uptick in incidences didn’t mean more discrimination was happening, but that “schools are more sensitive to it and reporting every little thing that comes up.”
Regardless, the district should continue training staff and students. The key is training adults not to ignore students who complain of discrimination. It’s a good program that needs to be continued.
