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Written by Lisa Neff, Staff writer
Jul 14, 2011
ACLU It Gets Better founder Dan Savage, Wendy Walsh, Shawn Walsh and James Gilliam of the ACLU. The ACLU represented Wendy Walsh in filing a complaint after her son Seth committed suicide last fall. – Photo: Courtesy
Federal officials recently failed a California school district, finding that administrators did not protect a 13-year-old boy from “persistent, pervasive and often severe sex-based harassment.”
The report from officials in the U.S. Education and Justice departments focused on Tehachapi Unified School District, Jacobsen Middle School and the harassment 13-year-old Seth Walsh faced before he killed himself last September.
The 2010-11 school year began with a series of unrelated suicides by young boys, all of them bullied because they were gay or perceived to be gay. Seth Walsh hung himself from a tree in his family’s backyard two weeks after he started eighth-grade at Jacobsen Middle School in the Tehachapi mountain region southeast of Bakersfield.
After her son’s death, Wendy Walsh and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint alleging a violation of her son’s civil rights.
Responding, federal investigators interviewed school administrators, teachers and about 75 students. They concluded, “Sexual and gender-based acts of verbal and physical aggression, intimidation and hostility directed toward the student – particularly in light of their cruel, relentless and inescapable nature, in conjunction with the student’s young and vulnerable age – were clearly sufficient to create a hostile environment that limited the student’s ability to participate in and benefit from the school’s education program.”
A federal report on the investigation detailed two years of harassment. Seth Walsh was subject to inappropriate touching, rumors, physical attacks and verbal slurs – “fag,” “queer,” “fruity.” He became afraid to use the rest room or to change clothes in the locker room.
Investigators found that the district disciplined one student, but that the school principal and vice principal repeatedly ignored a number of complaints from Seth and his mother.
The vice principal explained, after one complaint, “that in a perfect world, the student would be treated equally, but that students were at a difficult age and he could not change attitudes originating in the students’ homes.”
The investigators, citing other similar incidents, wrote, “When administrators should have been actively communicating to students the importance of treating the student with respect and of intervening on his behalf when others did not do so, they instead engaged in passive, incomplete action or inaction, creating for some students the perception that the harassment was acceptable.”
A settlement in the complaint requires the school district to form an advisory committee to deal with harassment, to revise school policies and to implement a training program.
