Districts & Schools

Boulder, Colorado
Boulder Valley School District

Ensuring that everyone’s point of view counts

In Boulder, improving school climates is one of three top goals districtwide. That’s where the Boulder Valley Safe Schools Coalition comes in.

“We’re a community advisory group to the superintendent, and that’s rare,” says co-founder Jean Hodges. She’s also the national vice president of Parents, Families, & Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) – and a past president of Boulder County’s PFLAG chapter.

The coalition started in 1998 with the vision that each school is a place where every family can belong, every educator can teach, and every child can learn.

“We believe strongly that you stop harassment early on and reaffirm it all along the way,” says Hodges. “But, we realized that there wasn’t anything being done to change climates in terms of acceptance. There was no programming in place.”

In 2000 Hodges developed the coalition’s Everyone Counts program. “It’s the best program that I know around the country,” she says. “If we can change people’s perspectives about how they look at lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning students – and any students who are marginalized for who they are – it’s going to change behaviors.”

The program is infused into elementary, middle and high school core subjects such as social studies and English.

“For instance, we look at the concept of family in the elementary grades,” says Hodges. “Every school teaches about family as a social unit. There are many forms of family, and they’re all okay.”

One of the program’s goals at the elementary level is to stop name calling.

“When young children say ‘gay,’ they may not know what it means, but they’ve learned it’s negative,” says Hodges. “In order to deal with bullying, you have to deal with attitudes in schools throughout the entire system. It’s a matter of making a very conscious effort to respect and accept others.”

Case in point: When students at Platt Middle School teamed up to stop harassment and extend students’ understanding of each other’s points of view, putdowns became rare.

“Students handmade posters about stopping putdowns, and the posters were everywhere in the school,” says Hodges. “Older kids worked with the incoming sixth graders, and they really changed the culture. It was successful because the kids owned it.”

For more information, contact the Boulder Safe Schools Coalition at bouldersafeschools@yahoo.com.