The American Civil Liberties Union announced the end of a year-long lawsuit it brought on behalf of several students who had sought to form a gay-straight alliance club at Boyd County High School in Kentucky. The settlement requires the district treat all clubs equally and conduct an anti-harassment training for all district staff as well as all students in high school and middle school.
‘The Boyd County Public Schools wasted over a year’s time and a lot of taxpayer money to try to stop these students from having their club, when a federal judge had already made it clear that the district was breaking the law by trying to silence students who wanted nothing more than a place to talk about how to stop anti-gay harassment and discrimination at school and in the community,’ said Tamara Lange, an attorney with the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project who represented the GSA. ‘This should serve as a reminder to schools everywhere that they can’t tinker around with federal law in an attempt to pick and choose which clubs they want to allow to exist.’