How School Vouchers Can Protect Gay Teens

A series of high-profile suicides has increased awareness of anti-gay bullying. But there's an easy solution to help gay students escape to safer private and charter schools.

School vouchers can help liberate gay and lesbian youth from the terror of growing up gay in the typical American public school.   A recent series of high profile suicides by gay teens has led to an increased level of awareness of the sort of bullying that LBGT youth face in schools.  The enormously successful “It Gets Better” campaign promises things will eventually be easier and has elicited a fashionable trend of pro-LGBT testimony from prominent figures such as President Obama and British Prime Minster David Cameron.   But talk is cheap.  If leaders actually cared about the safety of LGBT youth, they would allow us to be liberated from the tyranny of hateful public schools by issuing vouchers that would allow gay kids to attend safer private and charter schools.

Anti-gay bullying in our schools is the perfect example of why school vouchers are necessary.  A study by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network shows that 85% of LGBT students experience bullying in school.  Gay and lesbian youth -- especially those in small towns or inner-city neighborhoods -- are often trapped in hostile, violent schools where bullying is tolerated or even encouraged by adults.  Vouchers that allow students to attend charter or private schools could liberate LGBT youth from the terror of bullies and from the tyranny of conservative-dominated school boards that promote anti-gay hostility as a matter of policy.

Currently, gay kids find themselves trapped in hostile, dysfunctional schools with no escape.  I speak from personal experience: There were 3 openly gay kids in my high school. I was one of them and I ended up graduating and going on to college and graduate school.  The other two dropped out, because they didn't have the luck of supportive parents and siblings. While I experienced some anti-gay bullying myself as a boy in small-town Texas in the 1990s, I was lucky my parents were accepting and supportive, and my older brothers were on orders to protect me.  That protection saved me from the fate of being a high school dropout, because if I had to endure the slurs and beatings that other gay kids experienced at my school, I never would have made it to graduation, I'm not even sure I would have made it to adulthood at all.  I was lucky to attend school with older siblings around to protect me, and lucky my parents weren't ashamed of me.

What about other kids who aren't so lucky? Why should they be trapped in hateful schools where incompetent administrators let bullies run wild, where organized homophobic politics make teachers fearful to intervene?  Why shouldn't harassed gay kids get a chance to use a school voucher to attend a progressive Quaker or Jewish day school even if their parents can't afford it?  Even Catholic schools, which are more systematically hateful, are actually physically safer for gay kids than public schools.

Conservatives have long argued that vouchers represent a way out for those trapped in poverty. Conservatives have also long enjoyed bullying and demeaning gay people as if for sport.  Maybe it's time to use the conservative "weapon" of school vouchers and use it to protect kids from that other favorite conservative "weapon": political homophobia that directly enables school bullies and even prevents school districts from introducing anti-bullying laws and policies.