Official Regrets Advice to Gay Student
Kevin Jennings was teaching high school in 1988 when a gay student confessed an involvement with an older man. Rather than reporting it, he told the boy, "I hope you knew to use a condom."
The Obama administration Wednesday defended an Education Department official over advice he gave a gay student about sex 21 years ago.
The official, Kevin Jennings, says he should have handled the situation differently when he told the boy he hoped he had used a condom during a sexual encounter with an older man.
Jennings, who now heads the department's Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, has been under fire from conservatives and right-wing groups for not reporting the incident to authorities or to the boy's parents.
In a statement Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Jennings has devoted his career to promoting school safety.
"He is uniquely qualified for his job, and I am honored to have him on our team," Duncan said.
Jennings was teaching high school in Concord, Mass., in 1988 when a sophomore boy confessed of an involvement with an older man in Boston.
Telling the story a dozen years later, Jennings described how the boy told of meeting the man in a bus station bathroom and going home with him. Jennings said he told the boy, "My best friend had just died of AIDS the week before. You know, I hope you knew to use a condom." Jennings was speaking during a conference of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, which he founded.
Conservative psychology professor Warren Throckmorton unearthed an audiotape of Jennings' comments to the conference and posted it on his Web site recently.
In the Education Department statement Wednesday, Jennings said, "21 years later, I can see how I should have handled the situation differently.
"I should have asked for more information and consulted medical or legal authorities," he said. "Teachers back then had little training and guidance about this kind of thing. All teachers should have a basic level of preparedness. I would like to see the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools play a bigger role in helping to prepare teachers."
The department noted that Jennings has won honors from groups including the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the National Association of Independent Schools, the National Education Association and the Massachusetts Counselors Association.
Some NEA members protested their organization's award to Jennings.
Story Reposted From
The Associated Press.
A 4th film on homophobic bullying is to be screened in all UK secondary schools next month. The film – the first of its kind to be sent to all schools – will try to stop pupils using the word "gay" in a derogatory way.
It tells the story of six teenagers – who are gay, straight or not yet sure of their sexuality – and are taking classes in hip hop dancing at a college in south London.
Some come out and are bullied for it, others conceal their sexuality out of fear. The film's director, Rikki Beadle-Blair, who wrote and played the lead role in the Channel 4 drama Metrosexuality, takes the role of the teacher.
The film, FIT, is part-funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families and will be sent to every secondary school next month by the gay rights charity Stonewall. A poll of more than 2,000 teachers, commissioned by Stonewall last year, found that 90% thought homophobic bullying occurred in their school. The same percentage had not been trained in tackling the problem.
A fifth said they did not feel comfortable talking about gay issues in the classroom, and one in six said they felt uneasy if a pupil asked a question about homosexuality.
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Chris Gibbons, Stonewall's senior education officer, said: "Teachers are still ill-equipped and unsure of how to deal with gay issues in their classrooms." The film is adapted from a play which has been seen by 20,000 pupils in the last two years.
Navdeep, a pupil at a south London school, said: "After watching the play, we realised it was wrong to use the word 'gay' as a cuss word. You shouldn't outcast your friend if they are gay."
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A San Francisco group billing itself as "the best in LGBT media" is claiming hundreds of public schools in California have signed up to show its films and use accompanying discussion materials. One film features a boy "coming out" by wearing his mother's bikini. Another film incorporates Native American spiritualism to cast LGBT (lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender) persons as "two-spirit" people.
Even though many youth are finding the courage to come out in middle or high school, we know that our schools aren’t always the safest or most welcoming places for LGBT, questioning, or straight ally students, or for students with LGBT family members we still have a long way to go in ending ignorance, harassment, and violence. At the same time, even though we may have movies like Brokeback Mountain or shows like Queer Eye, we don’t usually get to see the diversity of our identities and experiences represented on the big or small screens
