Can Same-Sex Parents Get a Break on College Financial Aid?

Same-sex parents are used to the routine of crossing out “Mother” or “Father” on various forms and writing in whatever applies to our family. What happens, however, when this is asked on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, used by most colleges and universities to determine a student’s contribution towards the cost of his/her education? Can we fill in the form literally and thus not count one parent’s earnings (meaning potentially more aid)?

That’s the question my spouse Helen asked over at her blog. I’ll let you pop over there for her thoughts on the subject.

Teaching Science to Kindergarteners

Children get turned off to science early, says Scientific American, saying, “Studies have found that children in kindergarten are already forming negative views about science that could cast a shadow across their entire educational careers. . . . Furthermore, even before first grade, fewer girls than boys say they like science.”

One solution, from educational psychology researchers at Purdue University, is to teach science in kindergarten by integrating it with language teaching. Bravo—that’s the kind of integrated instruction I’ve written about before. President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act focused on reading and math to the detriment of other subjects, but there’s no reason one can’t learn to read and write by reading and writing about science, or history, or social studies. It really took a major university study to figure this out?

The article does, however, make the excellent point that: “The goal of science education at the earliest levels should be to encourage and refine children’s innate love of exploring the world around them and to help that enthusiastic behavior grow into true scientific literacy.”

I should add that I’m not one to value scientific education over that of history, literature, or the arts.  I’m a big believer in the full range of the liberal arts as the basis of an education. Since scientific literacy is a part of that, however, I’m all for it.

The article is worth a read if you’re an educator or have young children.

LGBT Parenting Roundup

Let us first take a moment to remember Lawrence King, the eighth grader who was shot and killed two years ago today by another student whom he asked to be his Valentine.

Politics and Law

• The Florida Department of Children and Families agreed to provide state Medicaid insurance, subsidized college tuition, and other benefits to the adopted son of gay Key West resident Wayne LaRue Smith. Smith became the first gay person to adopt in the state, after first fostering the boy and then being named his legal guardian. The DCF did not challenge the adoption, because it came after a legal guardianship, but because of the guardianship, they refused to provide the benefits normally given to children adopted from state care.
• Lesbian moms Angela Alfarache and Ivonne Cervantes are the featured couple in a New York Times story about marriage equality in Mexico City.

Schools and Youth

• The San Francisco school board voted in favor of $120,000 for instruction and services related to gay and lesbian issues. District staff must seek outside funding to cover the costs, but the measure guarantees at least a half-time position and other services, including the tracking of bullying based on sexual orientation.
• Change.org is running a petition asking Montgomery County Schools, near Washington, D.C., to stop allowing “ex-gay” organization Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) to distribute literature to high school students telling them that if they were LGBT or knew someone who identified as LGBT, they could change. (Much as I abhor the thought of such distribution, I wonder whether, from a legal perspective, they could ban PFOX but not PFLAG. Any lawyers want to weigh in? Could the PFOX material be proven fallacious or hateful, for example?)
• After a public hearing, the Tulsa County Union Public School District voted to keep the book Buster’s Sugartime on library shelves. The book is the print version of the television episode in which rabbit Buster visits a two-mom family at their maple sugar farm in Vermont. The episode caused an outcry a few years ago from President Bush’s Secretary of Education.

Personal Stories

• NPR’s StoryCorps has a wonderful, touching piece in which MJ Seide talks to her granddaughter Genna Alperin about falling in love with her partner, Genna’s other grandmother. Go listen, but have tissues handy.
• Haaretz.com has a good feature on gay and lesbian families in Israel, and in particular, their interactions with schools. (Thanks, Alex!)
• Thomas Beatie, who made headlines two years ago as the first pregnant transgender man many people had ever seen, is now pregnant with a third child for him and his wife Nancy.
• Chicago Now’s Lavender Menace column has a fun piece on “How to Throw a Lesbian Baby Shower“—during the Super Bowl.

Resources

• Trans Youth Family Allies has a very useful set of Frequently Asked Questions about gender variant and transgender youth.

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Preview Review: A Family Is a Family Is a Family

Rosie O’Donnell’s new documentary A Family Is a Family Is a Family, premieres this Sunday, January 31, at 7 p.m. ET on HBO. I’ve seen a screener, and here are my thoughts.

Overall, this is a great film, aimed at the elementary school ages, that focuses on children of various backgrounds speaking about their families. There are children with same-sex parents, opposite-sex parents, single parents, parents of different races, adoptive parents, children living with grandparents, and more. It is a wide-ranging sampling of the great diversity of family life in our country. If there is one gap, it is that there are no children with transgender parents—or at least none that speak about having them. Read the rest of this post »

Who You Callin’ No-Name Calling Week?

Today kicks off No-Name Calling Week, “an annual week of educational activities aimed at ending name-calling of all kinds and providing schools with the tools and inspiration to launch an on-going dialogue about ways to eliminate bullying in their communities.” The event is organized by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), in partnership with a whole host of LGBT, educational, youth, and social justice organizations (including, I’ll note, the Girl Scouts but not the Boy Scouts).

They have produced a series of lesson plans for different ages, along with a variety of other resources. Good stuff.

On a related note, this seems a good time to mention a separate initiative in the U.K. Leading LGBT group Stonewall has produced a feature film on homophobic bullying that it is sending to all secondary schools in Britain next month. The movie, FIT, is an adaption of a play the organization produced that has been seen by 20,000 pupils to date. The Times calls it “a kind of gritty take on the shiny E4 drama Glee.”

Without getting into heavy cinematographic comparisons between the two, I’ll say that it looks pretty good from the trailers, even if it doesn’t star Jane Lynch.

Will teachers actually show it? The Times asked the same question of the film’s writer and director, Rikki Beadle-Blair, who said they will be doing screenings for teachers so they can view the film, ask questions, and become more comfortable showing it in class.

It makes me wonder, though: What advantages does a fictional drama have over anti-bullying documentaries like the ones from Groundspark? What disadvantages? How do they complement each other? And most importantly, why can’t we do something like this in the U.S., even at a state level? (Aside from the fact that the right-wing goes apes**t every time someone mentions LGBT-inclusive diversity education.)

Trailer after the jump: Read the rest of this post »

Lesbian Moms Rejected as Leaders of Son’s Cub Scout Troop

Cate and Elizabeth Wirth, a lesbian couple in Vermont, were told by a Vermont district director of the Boy Scouts that they could no longer volunteer for their son’s Cub Scout troop after it became known that they are a couple. According to the Rutland Herald, Richard Stockton, Scout executive for the Green Mountain Council, confirmed, “The national policy of the Boy Scouts of America is we don’t accept gays and lesbians as volunteers.”

This is awful, but given the Boy Scout’s previous history with gay matters, it is perhaps not surprising. (For the record, I also have a serious problem with the fact that the Boy Scouts don’t allow atheists or agnostics to be leaders, either.)

What is interesting, however, and what I hope will stir some discussion among those of you who are around over the holiday, is this comment from one of the mothers: Read the rest of this post »

High School Performance of Gay-Themed Musical Receives Cheers, Not Jeers

Last week, I wrote about the performance of a Tony Award-winning gay-themed musical by students at Massachusetts’ Concord-Carlisle Regional High School. Anti-LGBT group MassResistance was up in arms about a high school producing a “depraved homosexual musical” and was trying to use director Peter Atlas’ supposed friendship with Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education Kevin Jennings to smear Jennings.

What would happen, I wondered, at the actual performances? Protests? Catcalls? Snickers from fellow students in the audience?

The reality was much happier. Sarah S. Brannen, the author and illustrator of gay-inclusive children’s book Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, attended the show on Saturday and was kind enough to submit this guest post about it.

December 13, 2009

Falsettos in Concord

I went to see Falsettos at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School on Saturday night. According to the Boston Globe, it was the first-ever production of the musical by a public high school. A production of The Laramie Project by the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School two years ago met with pickets and protests, so I was delighted to see nothing outside the school but audience members hurrying through the cold. Read the rest of this post »

Glee Doesn’t Have Anything on These Kids

The drama group at Concord-Carlisle Regional High School in Massachusetts is performing William Finn and James Lapine’s Tony Award-winning musical Falsettos this weekend. That might seem to be of only local interest, except that the play is about a man who leaves his wife for another man, and the impact of that decision on his wife, son, and two other couples, one lesbian and one straight. The school is the first public high school in the country to produce it for an outside audience, reports the Boston Globe.

The right-wing group MassResistance, which campaigned against marriage equality here in the Bay State, recently sent out an online newsletter with the headline, “Concord-Carlisle High School presenting depraved homosexual musical.’’

The students don’t seem to mind. Director and math teacher Peter Atlas says that when he told the straight students playing the two gay male leads that if their performances were any good, people would likely assume that they, too, were gay, it wasn’t a problem for them. For sophomore Hannah Kilcoyne, who plays the 12-year-old son, the play hits closer to home. After being married to Hannah’s father, her own mom discovered she was a lesbian. Read the rest of this post »

Alameda Diversity Curriculum Is Not Health Ed; Parents Can’t Opt Out Their Kids

Many of you followed last spring’s story about the uproar by some conservatives when the Alameda, California school board decided to adopt an LGBT-inclusive safe-schools curriculum. Now comes a new ruling stating that because the diversity curriculum doesn’t constitute health education, parents cannot opt their children out of it. Finally, a glimmer of understanding that teaching about LGBT people and families doesn’t mean teaching about sex.

The ruling comes in response to a group of parents who filed a lawsuit over the district’s refusal to excuse their children from attending the classes. The parents are supported by the conservative Pacific Justice Institute.

On Tuesday, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch tentatively denied the parents’ request. He said the lessons don’t constitute health education, as the parents are arguing, and thus don’t fall under the state legislature’s has opt-out rules related to health lessons. John Knox White has details of the proceedings over at Stop, Drop and Roll. He reports that Judge Roesch was persistent in trying to pin down Kevin Snider, the Pacific Justice Institute’s General Counsel, on exactly how anti-bullying education is a part of Health Education: Read the rest of this post »

Protect Maine Equality Responds to Fear Ad

Protect Maine Equality has responded to Stand for Marriage Maine’s Prop 8 copycat ad I posted about last week. They now have two new ads out, one that directly addresses the allegations raised by the right-wing ad.

In my previous post, I cautioned the Maine equality group against responding in the same way the No On 8 group responded in California. The California response, I wrote, “focused on the lack of harm that marriage equality would cause the children of straight parents rather than stressing the harm to children of LGBT parents and LGBT youth themselves. The former will lead to many straight parents not caring whether the measure passes; the latter has a chance of appealing to their protective parenting instincts.”

Did Protect Maine Equality succeed? Here’s the first video. Read my opinion and see the second video after the jump. Add your own thoughts in the comments.

I think this is better than the No On 8 response, but still has its faults. Read the rest of this post »