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NJ
Supreme Court
Hears
Anti-Gay Bullying Case
by
365Gay.com from the Web, November 13, 2006
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Trenton, New Jersey -- The New
Jersey Supreme Court has reserved judgment in a case seeking to determine
whether public schools can be held accountable for permitting a hostile
environment toward LGBT students.
The Toms River Regional School District was appealing a ruling ordering it to
pay $50,000 to a student who was repeatedly beaten by other students who
perceived him to be gay.
In December the court of appeals upheld a ruling by the state Division on Civil
Rights that students must receive the same protections from bias as people in
the workplace.
The school district's lawyer said children and schools cannot be held to the
same standards as workplaces and employers.
"The rules are entirely different for the workplace than they are for schools,"
attorney Thomas E. Monahan told the court. "We can't just fire a student.
It's rare that a student gets expelled."
But Deputy Attorney General James R. Michael argued that the district could have
done more to stop the harassment.
"They didn't do enough, given the circumstance and information, to properly
address the problem," he said.
The case, which dates to 1999, involved a student identified only as L.W., who
was perceived to be gay and harassed and assaulted by classmates beginning when
he was in the fourth grade.
The harassment got so bad, the boy at one point refused to go to school the
following year, although he finally did, according to the New Jersey branch of
the ACLU which represented him.
"You're a dancer, you're gay, you're a faggot, you don't belong in our school,
get out," read a note inserted into his school locker.
The boy's mother complained to school officials, and Irene Benn, an assistant
principal at Toms River Intermediate West, identified some of the children
responsible, telling them on more than one occasion that their behavior was
inappropriate and giving detention to one of them, the opinion said.
The boy was harassed twice when he attended Toms River South High School, and
the students involved in those incidents were suspended from school, even though
the confrontations occurred off-campus.
After his mother filed a complaint, the Division on Civil Rights found that even
though the boy had been subjected to bias-based harassment by at least 18
students in a four-month period, the school district failed to put the school on
notice that such behavior was unacceptable, even though it dealt with each of
the individual offenders.
The district was ordered to reprint its student handbooks so that they
explicitly ban bullying on the basis of sexual orientation. It also was
ordered to annually train staffers -- as well as middle and high-school students
-- in those policies for at least the next six years.
The Supreme Court gave no indication when it might rule in the case.
In April a national study on bullying released by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight
Education Network found that nearly one-in-five students had been physically
assaulted because of their sexual orientation and over a tenth because of their
gender expression.
Over a third of students said they experienced physical harassment at school on
the basis of sexual orientation and more than a quarter on the basis of their
gender expression.
The survey, released in conjunction with National Coming Out Day also showed
that three-quarters of students over the past year heard derogatory remarks such
as "faggot" or "dyke" frequently or often at school, and nearly nine out of ten
reported hearing "that's so gay" or "you're so gay" -- meaning stupid or
worthless -- frequently or often.
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