"Am I safe here?" LGBTQ students ask this question every day within the school system. This book shines a light on the marginalization and bullying faced by LGBTQ youth, offering a new conceptualization of school safety. Donn Short treats students as the experts on what happens in their schools, giving them a chance to speak for…

"Educational Exclusion: Drop Out, Push Out, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline among LGBTQ Youth" provides an in-depth look at the conditions that effectively push LGBTQ youth out of school and potentially into the criminal justice system. The report provides specific, real world guidance to address the hostile school climates and…

Emerging evidence suggests that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth experience disparate treatment in schools that may result in criminal sanctions. In an effort to understand the pathways that push youth out of schools, we conducted focus groups with youth (n = 31) from Arizona, California, and Georgia, and…

The Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at Mayfair Middle/High School, in concert with other clubs on campus, is steadily shifting school culture toward one of inclusion. Teachers and students alike are noticing a change. Teachers believe that students are altering the language they use in class to better accommodate diverse students. The hard work of…

Acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) adolescents in high schools is growing. Yet, the experience of this family suggests that creating and maintaining a safe environment for GLBTQ students requires constant vigilance, even in the best of environments. As school administrators face competing pressures from…

Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) are student-led, school-based clubs that aim to provide a safe environment in the school context for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, as well as their straight allies. The present study examines the potential for GSAs to support positive youth development and to reduce associations among…

Milwaukee's gay-friendly Alliance High School was conceived to be a welcoming and confirming school for kids who have been teased and bullied and had their interests marginalized in traditional schools. The result is a group of teens who feel they have found a safe place as they explore who they will be and how they will live the rest of their…

Peer relationships are a vital part of adolescents' lives. For lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth, whether these relationships are supportive and positive, or filled with stigma, prejudice, and discrimination rests, to some degree, on their heterosexual peers' attitudes and beliefs about homosexuality. For while LGBT youth may…

This article explores how a curriculum of film becomes organized by the teacher's worries about what film may open up in class. The author focuses on her own worries about showing Gus Van Sant's (2003) film, "Elephant," an elliptical and dreamlike study of the murders in 1999 of twelve students and a teacher at Columbine High School, to a class of…

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth may face particularly hostile school climates, as they often report experiencing harassment, discrimination, and other negative experiences in school. LGBT youth, regardless of their gender identity, often face victimization and stigmatization based on both sexual orientation and gender…

A growing body of research indicates that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students are often unsafe at school. Little research has examined school safety for students with LGBT parents. We examined adolescents' perceptions of school safety for students with LGBT parents using data from a survey of 2,302 California sixth through…

Like all teens, sexual minority youths (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) face many challenges, including student-on-student sexual orientation harassment. The authors examine recent research into the relative frequency, the potential impact, and school district responsibility to protect sexual minority youths from ongoing…

In 1997 an online survey of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth was conducted. The survey, which was available only on the Internet, was promoted through magazines and the World Wide Web. It contained more than 150 questions and took about half an hour to complete. Although all people accessing the web site were allowed to complete the…

Sexual minority adolescents--those self-identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) or with same-sex desires or sexual experiences--report higher rates of victimization and suicidality than their heterosexual peers, yet little empirical research has examined school factors associated with these risks. This study used data from the Massachusetts…

This paper presents data from the 2001 National School Climate Survey on school-related experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students. LGBT students described experiences of homophobic remarks; verbal, physical, and sexual harassment; and comfort within their schools. They described experiences with racial and sexual…