Civil rights protection for all students

Students taunt a 7-year-old African-American girl as she rides her bus home from school. The young girl is teased about her hair and the color of her skin. At another school, a student is teased and picked on because his classmates decide that he is gay because he has chosen not to go to a school dance. The young man is the victim of angry and hateful words and is eventually assaulted in a school restroom. In a third school, a Jewish student sees that someone has painted a swastika in a hallway along with a hateful anti-Semitic message. Because she feels unsafe, the student removes a Star of David that she has worn around her neck since she was a child.

Unfortunately, these events are real, they are recent, and they occurred in Maine. Thankfully, another student stood up for the young African-American girl and told those tormenting her to stop. They did. The irony of this story is that the tormentors were high school students while the student who spoke up in defense of her friend was a second-grader. The young man who was abused because others thought he was gay was not so fortunate. No one in his middle school stood up for him. He eventually dropped out of high school before graduating. The third student, the young Jewish girl, was left with the belief that she had to deny her heritage to be safe in school, all because of the senseless and hateful acts of others.

The saying “Maine – the way life should be” does not ring true for all students in Maine’s schools. That is why the Office of the Attorney General has worked to establish Civil Rights Teams in more than 200 schools throughout the state. The goal of these teams is simple: to reduce the incidence of bias-motivated harassment and violence in schools and to ensure that all students feel safe and welcome.

Students who are the targets of bias-motivated harassment and violence become fearful and anxious. Fear and anxiety inhibit learning. Therefore, helping students to feel safe and welcome is not only the right thing to do; it is the smart thing to do. School Civil Rights Teams work throughout the school year to help ensure that their school environment is a place where everyone feels safe and welcome, regardless of who they are, where they were born or what religion they choose to practice.

The Maine Civil Rights Act makes it unlawful for any person to commit acts of violence or to threaten violence when those actions are motivated by bias based on race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation and physical or mental disability. Each year, the Office of the Attorney General sponsors a Statewide Civil Rights Team Conference to educate students and their adult advisers about the Civil Rights Act. This year’s conference was held at the Augusta Civic Center on April 15. At that conference, more than 2,000 elementary, middle and high school students, along with their adult advisers, chose from 33 different workshops, many of which were designed and presented by students themselves. Those workshops covered every aspect of the Maine Civil Rights Act.

Following this year’s conference, certain individuals called for the elimination of the Civil Rights Team Project. They criticized the Team Project because of two workshops that dealt with discrimination against persons because of their perceived or real sexual orientation. The sad reality is that bias-motivated incidents directed at persons because of their sexual orientation do occur in Maine’s schools. The consequences of these incidents are real and the young people who are victimized suffer greatly. Education reduces ignorance, bias and intolerance and, thus, reduces bias-motivated incidents. The goal of the workshops was to provide this education.

In a recent newspaper column, a critic of the Civil Rights Team Project alleged that the project portrays victims of bias-motivated behavior as “helpless” and that it labels “white, heterosexual, male Christians as the ultimate victimizers.” Accusations of this type are baseless and deliberately misleading or worse. The goal of the Civil Rights Team Project is to ensure that all students are safe in schools. The project plays no favorites and does not elevate the rights of any one group above those of any other. Neither does the Project label any one group as “victimizers.”

While all persons are entitled to their opinions, opinions that ignore fact or are based on distortion add nothing to meaningful debate. Those distortions are also an insult to the thousands of young students, faculty advisers and community members who voluntarily give their time, energy and creativity to making our institutions of learning safe for everyone.

In 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court said that the provision of public education “is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.” That remains true today. In order to educate young people, we must create a school environment in which each and every student feels safe, welcome and respected for who they are. When students are able to spend their time in school concentrating on getting an education rather than worrying about how they are going to get through the day, then and only then will we be successful in providing what the Supreme Court labeled as our most important governmental function.

G. Steven Rowe is Maine’s attorney general.