Written by:
Roxanne Clair
Alana Flores, then in the tenth grade, didn't think of herself as a celebrity when someone left a picture of a bound, gagged, naked woman in her high-school locker. Scribbled across the picture was the ominous threat, "Die, dyke!"
After three years of such treatment, Flores, an honor-roll student and dance scholarship recipient, was ready to fight back in a big way. In April 1998, she launched a landmark lawsuit against Live Oak High School and the Morgan Hill School District, accusing administrators of failing to protect her from constant harassment.
The suit hit a nerve with many other Live Oak High and Murphy Middle School students. Eventually, five other plaintiffs (four girls and one boy) joined forces with Flores, forming the largest group to bring such a suit against a school district.
Morgan Hill School District enrolls approximately 9,000 students in the semi-rural town of Morgan Hill, Calif., about 30 minutes south of San Jose. Two thousand of these students, from grades 10 through 12, attend Live Oak High.
Though attorneys for the district expected Flores vs. Morgan Hill to be tossed out, U.S. District Judge James Ware ruled instead that the suit was justified, paving the way for a jury trial.
Because Flores is the only plaintiff willing to use her real name in the suit, the media has focused on her, even more so as the case heads for trial this September.
Although she didn't "come out" as a lesbian until her senior year, the harassment began early in her first year at Live Oak.
When she protested about a male student who repeatedly called her a "fucking dyke," a teacher asked, "Why don't you like that word? Is it because you're gay?"
When she began receiving threats left in her locker, Flores expected to be taken seriously. Even then, she claims, she received an inappropriate response--an assistant principal asked Flores if it was true that she was a lesbian, and did nothing to help her. Furthermore, school administrators refused her repeated requests for a new locker. She says she endured continued exposure to death threats and pornography at the same locker throughout her entire three years at Live Oak.
To the vulnerable teenager, the most horrifying aspect of the ordeal was the fact that she was being harassed about something she was not ready to admit to herself--that she could be gay.
"One of my biggest secrets, something that I couldn't even talk about to myself out loud in the bathroom--somebody knew about it and was using it against me, and that put more fear in me than the death threats themselves. It really barricaded me into the closet for a longer time than I should have been. It reinforced my fear of coming out," she says.
By her senior year, the stress had caught up with her.
"I was having a hard time with my sexuality and what was going on within me. I felt very exhausted emotionally. I felt very lost," she says.
The stress culminated in a suicide attempt, after which she poured out "everything" to her parents--telling them about the constant harassment, the death threats, and that she was, in fact, gay. As she struggled, her family showed unwavering love and support, and stood by her when she decided to file the lawsuit.
"My family is amazing," she says. "All of them have been totally giving of themselves, willing to drop what they need to do in order to help out, drive me somewhere, or go to a deposition."
All this has proved a particular challenge for Flores's younger sister, who happened to be a senior at Live Oak when the suit was filed. "She kind of had to fight the masses, in terms of what they were thinking and saying about me. That was hard for her, and she did an amazing job," Flores says.
Flores and the other plaintiffs in the suit are receiving legal help through the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR).
In preparing for litigation, NCLR attorney Leslie Levy discovered a long history of anti-gay problems at Live Oak High. She refers to an article in the school's newspaper, The Oak Leaf, from April 1993. The article details an incident of graffiti scrawled in an area where a few gay students, who were attempting to organize a support group, often hung out. The graffiti message said, "Kill all gays. Keep it in the closet."
Even board meetings for the district held heated debates over gay issues, such as whether or not a gay youth hotline should be included on emergency information cards passed out to all students.
Levy points out that the plaintiffs in Flores vs. Morgan Hill came to Live Oak after these episodes. "There is clear knowledge on the part of administrators that this [anti-gay] attitude was present in the school," states Levy. Yet, she says, the administration turned its back on the students' complaints of harassment.
Levy feels confident that Flores and the other plaintiffs will prevail in the case. "I think that there is no question that they were harassed, in many cases severely and in almost all cases in an ongoing, often daily basis; that the harassment was so open and obvious that teachers and administrators had to know about it; that it's clear that the school district, in almost every instant, failed to respond appropriately and to respond in a manner that sent the message to students that this was unacceptable behavior. The laws protect students from harassment and guarantee students an equal education regardless of their gender and their sexual orientation."
Levy explains that, despite the recent failure of the California State Assembly to pass A.B. 222, which would have included specific language regarding sexual orientation harassment, federal laws already specify that all students have the right to be safe from harassment in school.
Levy hopes the Flores lawsuit will force school officials nationwide to finally address the problem. "Not just rewriting policies and procedures," she says, "but real, serious change--where appropriate trainings are done, where you have faculty and staff that actually respond to instances of harassment."
In addition, the plaintiffs are asking for compensation for their suffering.
"Monetary damages are important because they were, in fact, significantly harmed," says Levy. "Some students have had problems with grades, some left school a year early and did independent study so they didn't graduate with their class. They've all had pretty significant emotional distress. They have flashbacks about what happened to them. They don't feel safe in the world. They learned a lot of very hard lessons before they should have had to."
While a great deal of attention recently has been focused on Alana Flores, she is obviously not alone in her experiences. According to the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), gay youth are seven times as likely as their non-gay classmates to be threatened with a weapon while at school and more than five times as likely to skip school because they feel unsafe at or en route to school, and the average high school student hears anti-gay epithets 25 times each day. In addition, students report that teachers fail to respond to such harassing behavior 97 percent of the time.
Even with the trial looming, Flores tries to plan for her future. While she is grateful for the opportunity to travel as an activist and speak about gay issues, she'd also like more time for other passions, such as dancing.
Through her work with NCLR and ACLU, Flores has learned more about how to handle harassment in school--information she wishes she had known years ago.
"I didn't report as much as I could have," she realizes now. "My protection for myself was to ignore it and act like it wasn't really going on. Throw it away, get rid of it, be strong and deal with it on my own. Reporting is very important, and who you report to is very important, also. I could have reported it to school board members, but that didn't occur to me when I was a sophomore in high school and getting death threats in my locker."
Instead, she handled the situation as best she could, eventually choosing to file the lawsuit nine months after she graduated. She explains, "I could have graduated from Live Oak, moved on with my life, and never looked back. But there was always something in me that said that's not the right thing to do, because it could happen to somebody else, over and over and over again."
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