Harvey Milk High School: A Blessing or a Curse? .
During the Civil Rights Movement, the case of Brown v. Board of Education overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. The Plessy v. Ferguson trial had made it legal for schools and public things to be "separate but equal." Brown v. Board of Education decided that "Separate but equal is inherently unequal." In the past twenty years, the youth of America has done similar things in the education system trying to get fair and equal treatment of gay, bi-sexual, lesbian and transgender students (GLBT). The Harvey Milk School (HMS) in New York City was first made in 1984, yet because of a rise in unfair treatment of GLBT students, their administration decided to expand their campus to house (for teaching) more students. Increasing the size of the school has made people talk about whether it is a good thing to have it or not. .
In the past twenty years, the statistics of hate crimes against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth have gone up. During 2002, law enforcement agencies reported 7,462 hate crime incidents that involved 8,832 offenses. Incidents of anti-gay hate violence rose 24 percent in the last six months of 2003, following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down sodomy laws. While our country is the one of the best in technology and social rights, in Tennessee on March 19th there was a law passed that banned homosexuality. This decree was overturned in less than three days, but it was still obvious that discrimination exists. Bad things are not only happening to the older members of the gay community. Statistics of discrimination against GLBT youth are even worse. In a survey of over five thousand GLBT students, 97% said they regularly hear homophobic slurs. 53% of the students reported hearing slurs from teachers and staff. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth are nearly three times more likely as their heterosexual peers to have been assaulted or involved in at least one physical fight in school, three times as likely to have been threatened or injured with a weapon at school, and nearly four times as likely to skip school because they felt unsafe, according to the 1999 Massachusetts Youth Risk Behavior Survey.
