The school, the Minnesota Department of Education and the ACLU reached a partial settlement in the case that requires charter schools to sign an annual statement declaring under penalty of law that the schools are not promoting religion.
The federal Department of Education and the Department of Justice have also launched investigations into the district after the suicide deaths of nine students in the past two years, several of whom were known to identify as LGBT.
Investigations of the bullying of LGBT kids is the biggest growth area in the Department of Justice’s civil rights division.
The Anoka-Hennepin School District and lawyers for six students who sued the district over bullying began talks this week in an attempt to reach a settlement. While those talks were underway, the Parents Action League submitted a petition to the school board urging it not to budge on a policy that limits discussion of LGBT issues in the schools. And PAL came under scrutiny by other parents who questioned the group’s ties to the Minnesota Family Council.
The Parents Action League is circulating a petition to the Anoka-Hennepin School Board asking it to maintain a policy that limits discussions of LGBT issues in the classroom. The petition comes as six students and their parents are suing the district over alleged persistent bullying in its schools and are requesting the policy be dropped. PAL’s petition asserts that LGBT people suffer “life-threatening health risks” and a flier by the group warns of a “radical homosexual agenda.”
A student filed suit against the Anoka-Hennepin School District on Monday alleging that the school district did not do enough to protect her from bullying. Filed by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the new suit alleges that a lesbian student was repeatedly harassed, both verbally and physically, and that the school undertook disciplinary action against the student instead of her tormentors.
The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights sent a letter to the Anoka Hennepin School District on Tuesday demanding that the school district abandon its “neutrality policy,” which bars discussion of LGBT issues in district schools, and step up efforts to address bullying and harassment.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota is demanding that the Northfield School District stop filtering LGBT internet content on the district’s computers. Calling it unconstitutional, the group sent a letter to the district calling for a halt to the filtering as well as a data practices request to identify how the filters got put into place. The move is part of the ACLU’s broader “Don’t Filter Me” project to prevent filtering of LGBT content.
The superintendent of a central Minnesota school district says a lawsuit against it by an anti-abortion legal group is a misunderstanding and that the litigation came out of the blue last Thursday. A representative of the Alliance Defense Fund, a national group that has sued numerous school districts, says the school should not be surprised by the lawsuit and claims it continues to violate students’ rights by not listing the All Life Is Valuable Club as “curricular.”
The national religious right legal group Alliance Defense Fund filed suit in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota last week on behalf of a student who is trying to form an anti-abortion rights group at the St. Michael-Albertville High School. The All Life Is Valuable (ALIV) Club was denied permission to become an “officially recognized club” because school administrators said it didn’t “support the student body as a whole.”
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