COLLABORATIVE PROJECT INFORMS FLORIDA SCHOOL DISTRICTS ABOUT LGBTQ RIGHTS

In partnership with Equality Florida, the state’s largest statewide LGBTQ advocacy organization, Southern Legal Counsel has engaged with all 67 Florida school districts to educate their leadership, personnel, students and parents on how to affirm, support, and protect LGBTQ students and their rights.

The organizations have begun distributing a series of LGBTQ Legal Notes, two-page explainers on topics such as use of affirmed name and pronouns, equal participation in athletics and extracurriculars, access to bathrooms and gendered spaces, and protection from bullying and harassment, as well as guidelines for reporting such behavior.   

Each topical legal analysis includes an overview of the districts’ legal duties, as well as a self-empowering “Know Your Rights” section for students and parents, and is distributed to school district attorneys, social workers, staff, leadership, and LGBTQ liaisons within every school district in Florida.

“The series is focused on protecting LGBTQ youth and keeping them in school, as experience with this community as well as longitudinal research have demonstrated many LGBTQ youth are pushed out of school due to un-affirming environments and discriminatory policies and practices,” said SLC attorney Simone Chriss.

Chriss also helped Equality Florida train more than 600 school district staff, principals, social workers, teachers, and others involved in Florida’s public school system on how to create an affirming, inclusive learning environment for transgender students through a January webinar.

As a result of the training, several school districts are making changes in their registration forms and student information systems and are moving towards more inclusive policies and practices that promote the academic success and overall wellbeing of LGBTQ youth.

In addition to the collaborative outreach work, when Equality Florida learns of an LGBTQ student whose rights are being violated, they refer the student to Chriss for representation.

“Typically kids who are being impacted by discriminatory school policies aren’t walking through our door or calling us to ask for legal assistance, so having Equality Florida on the ground working within these communities and identifying these systemic and individual issues is so helpful,” Chriss said.  

Among the issues identified recently, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a number of transgender students to be “outed” when their birth names appeared on screen in the new virtual learning environments rather than their affirmed names. While SLC works hard to provide access to the legal name change process for all Floridians through floridanamechange.org, many youth are still unable to obtain legal name changes, and as such their dead names (legal names) are still reflected on their education records.

“It was incredibly stigmatizing for some of these kids and created the risk of bullying and harassment by their peers,” Chriss said. “They were afraid to engage in school for fear of being outed to their peers through virtual learning programs that hadn’t been adapted to be safe and affirming for transgender youth. However, when a district reached out to me and brought this to my attention, we were able to swiftly work with the schools to get the student information systems updated to reflect only students’ affirmed names on the virtual learning platforms.”