A Virginia school board has quietly reversed the policy that blocked two middle schoolers from starting a Genders and Sexualities Alliance, adopting new rules days after settling the federal lawsuit the students filed against it.
A Club Request That Turned Into a Federal Case
The trouble started last August, when a seventh grader identified in court papers only by the initials Z.J.W. asked a teacher to sponsor a GSA at King George Middle School after researching the clubs at home. With her parents' support, the request went nowhere. Months later, the school board revised its student-organization policy to limit non-curricular clubs, the kind not tied directly to coursework, to high schoolers only.
The ACLU of Virginia and Potomac Law Group say that timing was no accident. In a lawsuit filed last month against the school board, Superintendent Jesse Boyd, and King George Middle School Principal Casey Nice, the plaintiffs argued the district rewrote its rules specifically to keep the GSA from forming, even though 17 students had expressed interest in joining.
Their evidence: several other non-curricular-style clubs at the middle school, including a Yearbook Club, a Robotics Club, a Book of the Month Club, and an Outdoor Club where students make fishing lures and skin squirrels, kept meeting freely because the district classified them as
Source: Metro Weekly
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