ELPS Staff Encourages Belonging, Inclusion for Queer Students Following Hate Crime
An April 15 hate crime perpetrated at the Michigan State University Library against LGBTQIA+ students was felt throughout the halls of East Lansing Public Schools (ELPS). MSU student newspaper, The State News even reported some of the seven suspects appeared to be high school age. Following the attack, East Lansing High School (ELHS) students and ELPS staff clamored to offer community and support to its queer students.
Diana Sanchez and Steven Neal teach Spanish and English, respectively, at ELHS and are co-advisers of the Social Justice Club. They were both hired into the district seven years ago.
“As a general populace,” Neal said, “there was acknowledgement that [the MSU hate crime] had happened. But I know for a lot of our queer youth and our queer staff members, there was a sense of uncertainty, apprehension, even fear in some cases, because it was so close to us. There was a little bit of an edge and I know for some of our queer youth, there wasn’t really a space to process, to ask questions, to get additional emotional support. I know our advisors and counselors did provide emotional and academic support around that time, but as a specific queer community, there wasn’t as much opportunity to come together for that.”
“I actually did have a staff member come up to me,” Sanchez said. “We had an informal staff meeting to at least talk about the situation, to acknowledge it, to make sure that staff is aware of how we would be supporting students moving forward. The staff member just happened to pass me in the hallway and said, ‘Diana, I know you do a lot, but I got to thinking how we can show students our support.’ Immediately, I had seen some information about the Salus Center and the MSU Library putting up signs at the library and I really like that because I think what our queer youth and queer staff need in situations like this is just to know that they are seen, they are supported, and valued. We just thought that that was a simple, impactful way to show the members of our community that we felt that way, that we wanted to create a safe space here at our school for all communities, but particularly after a hate crime like that.”
With the support and encouragement of students in the Social Justice Club, Sanchez and Neal gave students the opportunity to create messages of support and love for queer students and post them on the wall in a high-foot-traffic hallway.
“For many of them,” Neal said, “just having that in a very high traffic area was very well received. A couple students came to start having dialogue. It seems like there was a desire for a community connection, and just by sitting out there and helping kids to make these signs and talking to them about everything, it seems that there was a stronger, genuine connection between students and staff members and that’s something that definitely was needed to help process and grieving.”
ELi also spoke with District Mental Health Coordinator Heather Findley and Director of Equity and Social Justice Klaudia Burton about the general atmosphere for queer students in the district. Findley said students can find support from several places in the district.
“There is some real intentionality of aligning support so a student feels represented,” she said. “It’s going to be more likely to share those fears and concerns with someone who has some personal lived experiences or adjacent lived experiences. I have had counselors come to me as an openly gay staff member, saying, ‘This student is struggling or has been impacted and they would feel more comfortable having this conversation with you.’ I think that’s really important, whether that be a specific LGBTQIA+ person or somebody they can feel is super allied.
“Fortunately, our counseling department works really hard to create a safe zone and a safe space for folks regardless of identity mark and regardless of personal lived experience and I think they are really cognizant of that if students come forward.”
Burton explained that the ethos of acceptance starts early in the district.
“It’s as simple as the language,” she said. “Presenting words like, ‘This is a welcoming community and environment,’ [to children] as young as our kindergarten students. It’s how we greet our classmates [and] what words we choose within our space and how we talk to friends. Our elementary teachers still have morning meetings and carpet-time conversations where they can have family style conversations about important topics, like what it means to be a learner in a diverse community like East Lansing? Like, ‘Look around, who do you see? Not everyone looks like you.’ And obviously it gets more rich and more developed as we get older with our students and having conversations about inclusion, acceptance of diversity, and how do we honor that in our spaces? How do we stand up for each other if we witness injustices, if we witness microaggressions? We’ve gone as far as our students are leading [professional development for our teachers] on topics like microaggressions, macroaggressions, how they can be an upstander and not a bystander in these situations. We’re doing a lot with curriculum. We’re nowhere near where I want us to be at all, but we’ve made a lot of strides in trying to address the level of diversity that exists in curricular materials that exists, particularly in our K through 5 levels.”
For students in the middle and high schools, support can look different, Burton said.
“If students, typically at an older age, have family members who are not supportive and find themselves questioning gender or gender identity or expression of what they want to do or even go as far as name changing or thinking they do want to transition and their parents are not supportive, our counseling staff is here to walk them through that process,” Burton said. “Within our district, we have a policy that supports transgender students outright, policy 5106. In that, there are legal things we have to adhere to as a district.”
“At MacDonald [Middle School],” Findley said, “they kind of combined a social justice club and a queer friendly club together, so we have that at multiple levels… which is great. We recognize you don’t have to be 17 to start thinking about these things. That’s not what the research says. Students are really trying to explore these things about themselves and try to understand it at a younger [age] and I think that support is really great.”
Findley pointed out that ELPS has a history of inclusion, with the district having one of the first Mid-Michigan gay-straight alliances in the school, as far back as 1998.
Burton gave credit to the district school board, saying its advocacy portrays the true nature of the community.
“We have a board that is very steadfast in protecting all students that are within our district,” she said. “They are very supportive of the initiatives we want to put into place. I think largely our community has put these people onto the board, so regardless of backlash or anything that comes our way, there is an investment within the community to support these people and their platforms, to put them into school board positions, knowing these are things that might possibly come up. Things like what does it mean to have LGBTQIA policies or language around curriculum or what is their stance on banning books or whatever. I think that is at least a symptom of what this community represents.”
Sanchez and Neal hope some good can come in response to the hate crime. Sanchez said the school’s Multicultural Student Achievement Network, which she also advises, will likely dedicate an episode of its podcast, the Humanization Station, to the incident.
“I hope that this incident helps to spur larger conversations and knowledge surrounding queer identities, experiences and stories,” Neal said. “When we were young and in high school, we weren’t really having these open conversations about gender identity and expression, and sexuality, that I believe are more commonplace now, but hopefully this incident will cause people to learn more and challenge their beliefs more, but we also need to be really cognizant, like Diana said, we do live and work in a very accepting and inclusive community, but we need to also grapple that not all places are like that. Not even here in Michigan, let alone our country and our world. We also need to keep in mind that as educators and as people that are helping to bring about the next generation of human beings into the world, that they might be going to places that have differing opinions, that have differing levels of understanding and we need to know how to navigate that in ways that are respectful and humanizing.”