LGBTQIA+ Student Panel April 28, 2021 3 to 4 P.M
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LGBTQIA+ Student Panel April 28, 2021 3 to 4 p.m. SDCOE Facilitators • Dr. Fabiola Bagula, Senior Director, Equity Department • Anthony Ceja, Senior Manager, System of Supports Department • Felicia Singleton-Daniel, Director, System of Supports Department Student Panelists: • Grey • Shiloh • Jax • Annalee • Chelsea Student Moderators • Evan • Camille Dr: Fabiola Bagula: Welcome everyone! This is one of our favorite things that we do here as an Equity department and in partnership with our Student Services division as well. My name is Fabiola Bagula, she/her/hers and again on behalf of San Diego County Office of Education, we welcome you and we're very grateful that you're spending your afternoon here with us. As listeners and I know that we're here to listen to our students, we always ask that we take a listening stance that's very open heart, open mind, and open will and then of course leaning into Silko who is an American Indian scholar who states that our stories are not for our entertainment, but it is, they are for our learning. I know that all of us that are here to bear witness and to listen to children's stories that we're actually going to be impact change, back at our schools as a result of what we hear today. Thank you so much for joining us. I want to preface by saying that the slides that were created today, were a request of the student panelists. They, we talked to them about what would be the good dataset to have us go through and so this was their suggestion. I love that they have this level of autonomy and voice and it's of course our pleasure to amplify it. What we're going to do first is we're going to go over some brief data, but of course the majority of our time will be listening to our students and then in the end what they also suggested is they made a list of resources for all of our school systems. Again, when I think about amplifying student voice and agency and leadership the children you are about to listen are complete. They all, we should just hire them to run this department, quite frankly. They're going to be beautiful. This is some data from across our county and what I just want you to take a look at is the number of students that we have here in San Diego county, the number of students Page 1 of 17 who according to the California Healthy Kids survey identified mail, identified female, and identified non-binary. And I know the question that is on the slide is "what do you notice", "what are you curious about”, but I just want you to pay attention to that data set. Now moving forward to another piece of data is again what do you notice and what are you curious about now? As we know the California Healthy Kids survey is done with not all grades, but some grades and so we have some data on self-reported sexual orientation for grade 7,9, and 11. Again as you look at these numbers, as you look at self-reported sexual orientation, what do you notice and what are you curious about? These are the questions we should have because we should be very mindful that the children before us are sitting in our cis school systems and I know I always strive to do the best, but I also know that I might have, I made some mistakes that I want to correct. This session is again for us to get closer to understanding, to get bath, past allyship, and being more of an accomplice on behalf of our LGBTQIA+ youth and community. I'm know going to pass it along to Miss Singleton who is, I'm proud to be your, your colleague and friend. Felicia Singleton: Thank you so much and thank you Dr. Fabi. I too am proud to work alongside you and very proud to be here today as I am in the spirit of transparency learning to be a better accomplice. As Dr. Fabi said these young people have taught us so much as we prepared for this workshop. I want to point that out because I want to make it clear that you never reach a point of completion. This is a journey that we're all on as we're learning together and when we know better than, when we know better, we can do better. Keeping on with this same critical self-reflection, taking a look at suicide ideation and if you look at the date 2017 through 2019, this was even before the COVID-19 pandemic. When you look at this data think about your own context. Think about your own position of privilege in your role as an educator and the opportunities that you have to support young people who may be in your system struggling with all of the challenges that come with identifying something that is outside of the norm in our society. Here's school disconnectedness. This is a buzz word. Student engagement and feeling welcome and belonging, but again when you look at this specific demographic group, let's look at how disconnected they feel in school. Again, doing your own critical self-reflection, what do you notice, what are you curious about, but how can you leverage the power in your context to disrupt this? On our next slide LGBTQ youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness. You can read this, but I want to say it again LGBTQ youth are 120% more likely to experience homelessness and this could be for various reasons. Think about again how we're supporting are youth, so they feel safe to come to us and tell us what challenges they're having. It may be at home because they're not out or because they come out and they're not welcome in their home. They are pushed out on the streets, so how can we leverage our positions of power and privilege in our systems to give these youth the support that they need to ensure that they're taken care of? Here are just some quantitative snippets on how our young people feel when they're in our school systems and we ignore their identities. We ignore their chosen name, right, we're, we're totally ignored who they show up as and who they are as a person and we are in many ways erasing who they are. These are actual quotes from our young people, and I'll just give you a couple seconds to read them. If you notice, it's basic needs like using the restroom or being in a health class that doesn't acknowledge their gender identity or sexual orientation. In our next couple of slides really lean into the theory of intersectionality. Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberlé Page 2 of 17 Crenshaw, who is a civil rights attorney and professor. Really in talking about intersectionality we often talk about it as our gender and our race and how they intersect, but in reality, because we live in a society that tends to discriminate and push folks who are different to the margins, think of intersectionality as layers of overlapping weights that you're putting on. When you talk about race, when you talk about your identity, when you talk about your sexual orientation, or your gender, you know those are different weights because you're treated certain ways with all of those identities. Then you layer that on with the experiences of racism, so you feel already ostracized and pushed to the margins as someone that's identifying as LGBTQ and then, when you add the layer of race on there, there is another layer of discrimination. Again, these are just some data sets that we want you to not only view but think about how you can consume them and then apply them to your context. Lastly, we're looking at the bullying data. Again the, the courage that these youth have to show up and be their authentic selves, it cost them a lot of ways and this bullying data is alarming because this type of behavior often leads to that suicidal ideation or suicide completion. We're hoping that today you will hear their stories. We also want to say that these stories are the stories of these young people, but there are youth who chose not to come forward today because of fear. Fear of being outed, fear of retaliation and repercussions, but again we thank you today for just taking this stuff with us as we learn more from our students’ voices. Dr. Bagula: Again, I love that our students gave us the suggestions as to which data points to present and I also want to thank the Equity department, Ebonee Weathers that helped us create those slide decks that will be made available to you. Without further ado and what we would like to, of course, give the most of our time is to our students. I want to introduce to you both Evan and Camille who will be our MCs and honestly, I can just be quiet now because they are so good. Evan and Camille, it's all you. Camille: Hi everyone, good afternoon. To start us off, to start our panel off we are going to go around and share our names, how we identify and a bit about who we'd like to honor for being here today.