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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (21513)	5/12/1998 10:29:00 AM
From: Grainne	Respond to of 108807

Yes, Penni, it is the Walt Whitman School I was talking about. There was quite a long article in our local paper about it, but unfortunately it is not accessible on the net, for some reason. The school is still going strong, in the sense that everyone is committed to making it succeed. I guess you know it is on the grounds of a mostly gay church, so that provides a little security in terms of security of space. There is still a huge money struggle. Everyone is on financial aid of some kind, because they accepted every student who applied, even the ones who needed a lot of help with tuition. They based this on their feeling that these children had already been rejected so many times that they could not handle being rejected again. I was particularly heartened by the fact that a few of the students had had such negative school experiences that they had dropped out entirely, and are now giving school another try. So a couple of them are nineteen and not quite finished. The story of one heterosexual boy was particularly sad. His mother is gay. He never, ever told anyone at his public school anything about her, but once children had gotten to be real friends and he invited them over to his house, they found out, and went back to school and told everyone, and the boy was harassed continually. The students who were interviewed were very happy there. The one transgender student dressed like a girl, and was totally accepted. They have more students than they did, but I am not sure how many. It must be very hard to learn when you are worried about being teased or beat up, but of course the thing I am most happy about is that there has been an intervention so that these children will not feel as much like killing themselves or getting involved with risky sex, alcohol or drugs, which more gay children end up destroying themselves with not because they are gay, but because they have been treated so badly by the larger society. I wanted everyone to know that I am almost a week behind on answering most of my messages, but they are all still in my in box, and I am getting to them as fast as I can. I have just been horrendously busy, and every time I get a few minutes of free time, my daughter seems to need the computer for term papers. Have a lovely day, everyone!!! Oh, Penni, one more thing--I didn't know Walt Whitman was gay. Did you? I was surprised.