The suicides are horrible for all concerned, and lack of funding support makes addressing the problems worse for the school districts. While I was there, she went to a local middle school for roughly 2 days because the school needed additional support for a suicide there, which, of course, means she couldn’t be at her normally-assigned school, dealing with the problems there.

“Gay and lesbian student advocates complained Monday that the state’s largest district — Anoka-Hennepin — is not doing enough to protect them from harassment.

Gathering at the district’s Coon Rapids administration building, they said the district’s “neutral” policy toward gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) students encourages mistreatment of such students and discourages teachers from intervening to help them and to offer positive messages about their sexual orientation.”

http://www.startribune.com/local/north/103902163.html

I would also note that it may not be appropriate to shoehorn younger folks into a particular category in the GLBTQAW spectrum.

The actual school board is probably unable to utter words like “transsexual” or “lesbian” without blushing. The distinction between trans gender and lesbian and gay etc. etc. are pretty much not part of this discussion. In these parts, if you are not on the football or other major sports team you are either a fag or a girl.

This district includes much of the most populous county in the state MINUS the very progressive and liberal urban Minneapolis, plus working class suburbs, and NOT the wealthier suburbs in that county, plus a county that has dense conservative working class towns and very not-dense upper-upper areas all the kids go to private schools we are not even allowed to know about.

This school district corresponds to a large portion of the congressional districts of Michele Bachmann and her clone Erik Paulsen.

I would not be on even slightly thin ice to suggest that the majority of parents with kids in this district are just plain anti-gay, many of the students (I hope they are a bit more liberal than their parents) and quite possibly a large number of the teachers as well.

The head of the school board was backed by the Minnesota Family Council and is generally liked by local anti-gay groups.

There is a reason that federal authorities are poking around in AHSD.