The Seaholm community has hidden away a skeleton in its closet.
Last year’s homophobic defacements of several flyers advertising the Gay-Straight Alliance left a permanent stain on Seaholm’s prided reputation. In the wake of the vandalism the community began to work on overcoming the implications of the attacks.However, a new wave of incidents has set to work undoing that effort. Once more, Gay- Straight Alliance flyers are facing attacks.
Unlike last year, where attacks employed written threats and obscene language to denounce the GSA, the occurrences this year have been less overt.
Social Studies teacher Scott Craig, who is the faculty sponsor of the Gay-Straight Alliance, said that the attacks began alarmingly early in the year, with the first incident being reported to him four weeks into the first trimester. Since then, the attacks have been a regular occurrence, with Craig not knowing the exact number of attacks.
“Whenever we put a flyer up, it would be gone the next morning,” Craig said. “It’s systematic.”
Like last year, the efforts to repair the damage to Seaholm’s reputation, including an investigation by the administration, deliver a clear message: The students and faculty of Seaholm will not tolerate these actions.
English teacher Robin Moten is among the faculty speaking out against the attacks.
“I’m angry,” Moten said. “I couldn’t believe that people would do something like that. I’m sad that people think it’s okay to target other people like that.”
Although not directly involved with the GSA, Moten describes herself as an admirer of the GSA and its mission.
The administration has also taken note of the attacks, and Seaholm Principal Deanna Lancaster shares Moten’s view of the incidents.
“I think it’s disgusting,” Lancaster said. “It’s unfair to target any group of people like that.”
It is troubling to note that Seaholm is not the only school suffering attacks like these. In a 2004 report published by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, 51% of surveyed schools had reported at least one incident of homophobic bullying in a single term.
Worse yet, is that the verbal abuse seen at Seaholm is relatively tame compared to some other incidents – according to the report, violent attacks against gay or lesbian teenagers are alarmingly frequent, with as much as 40% of reported assaults occurring within a school setting.
In an effort to discover the identity of the perpetrator(s), the administration has turned to the school’s camera system. However, there has been no luck thus far in uncovering the identity of the attacker.
“We have cameras, but they aren’t always looking at the right places,” Lancaster said. “Since we don’t have a time frame, we can’t just have someone sift through hours of footage.”
Seaholm’s administration, perhaps coming to the same conclusion, suggested a solution: in order to protect the flyers, GSA members should post them behind protective wooden cases.
“We want to put the flyers in bulletin boards that the cameras can see,” Lancaster said. “The boards are in more strategic positions.”
“I have to respectfully disagree,” Moten said on the idea of protecting the flyers. “Although they are doing it to protect the students, they’re marginalizing the issue at the same time. We should be focusing on finding out who did it.”
That marginalization may be the cause of the apparent lack of student awareness of the issue.
“Most students have no idea that this has occurred,” Craig said. “That may be because we’re only dealing with one or two students here.”
Craig, like many others, believes the idea of spreading the word and generating awareness about the attacks is critical to the success of the search for the perpetrators.
“What people do not understand, is that the GSA is not just for gay students,” Craig said. “It’s for anyone who feels different and wants to support. So these attacks are not just targeting gay students, but one of the friendliest clubs in the school.”
While Craig is in support of raising awareness, Lancaster has a more cautious view.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Lancaster said. “The attacks were in poor taste, and are not okay. But sometimes raising awareness exacerbates the problem.”
“I hope something positive occurs,” Moten said. “This is not Seaholm; this is not who we are.”
