California school lets students wear anti-LGBT stickers

The lines around free speech and harassment are blurry, but finding them is offering an educational opportunity to one California community.

|
Noah Berger/AP/File
Rainbow flags fly in front of San Francisco City Hall in June 2013, shortly after the US Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for same-sex marriage in California.

A thorny scene playing out in southern California has one small community scrambling to find the elusive line between free speech and harassment.

The big question is whether students at Shadow Hills High School in Indio can wear anti-gay stickers that portray a small rainbow inside a circle with a line through it. So far, administrators and lawyers have decided that students have as much right to wear anti-gay stickers on their school ID badges as they do to wear stickers supporting gay rights, as long as they don’t harass students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT).

“If at any point students are interrupting class time to express their beliefs, they are to be sent to the discipline office with a referral for disruption,” said an email statement of the anti-gay students, sent to staff Wednesday by school administrators, according to a report from the Desert Sun.

“We all have a right to freedom of speech, but students also have a right to be educated without fear. This has always been our policy, and we will continue to enforce it," the e-mail said.

The US Supreme Court in 1969 ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines that students do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

Whether the stickers are harassment or free expression, some educators consider the dilemma facing its community in deciding to be a perfect opportunity for education, with many calling for the school to offer sensitivity training to students.

"It's not just dealing with the five or six kids. It's trying to change the culture to help the students feel emboldened to say to their classmates 'Hey, that's not OK. That's not appropriate,' " David Parsons, a Spanish and advanced placement (AP) literature teacher at Shadow Hills told the Sun.

The stickers started showing up a couple of weeks ago on students’ ID badges and on social media, and even on the classroom window of the school’s Gay Straight Alliance coordinator, reports the Sun. This has unnerved some students and staff, who say they feel targeted.

"Yes, there is freedom of speech established by Tinker, but at least in my view, it's a hate crime because a group was targeted," Amy Oberman, an AP US history teacher at Shadow Hills told the Sun.

"I'm Jewish, and if that had been a little swastika on my window, what's the difference?" she asked.

But as long as there is no bullying accompanying the free speech, the anti-gay stickers can stay. Administrators say this is not a decision that they made lightly; they agonized over the case before siding with free speech.

"Sometimes people can be uncomfortable because of an opinion, but that doesn't mean it's bullying," said Laura Fisher, assistant superintendent of personnel services for the Desert Sands Unified School District.  "We truly spent hours discussing this."

Some students that support gay rights are taking the opportunity to show their support for the LGBT cause.

"Shadow Hills High School has been able to come together and try and educate those discriminating,” said Michelle Bachman, a senior at Shadow Hills and vice president of the Gay Straight Alliance. “Instead of having anti-gay stickers in our lanyards, we have made heart stickers with rainbows to display our support and love."

[Editor's note: An earlier version of this story used an imprecise term to describe the category of speech under which the stickers fall.]

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to California school lets students wear anti-LGBT stickers
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0229/California-school-lets-students-wear-anti-LGBT-stickers
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe