It has been almost a year after Spirit Day where Twitter and Facebook turned purple on October 20th, in honor of the gay teenagers who have taken their own lives last year as a result of anti-gay bullying. Asher Brown, Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Raymond Chase, Cody J. Barker, Harrison Chase Brown, Caleb Nolt, Billy Lucas, Jeanine Blanchette and Chantal Dube are some of the gay suicides that occurred in the past year.

If those individuals were here today and enrolled within the Los Angeles Unified School District, things might have been a bit different. On Tuesday the school board approved a proposal in line with the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, a state mandate stemming from Senate Bill 48 to implement curriculum that portrays LGBT (and persons with disabilities) in a positive light. Within the next three months all staff will be trained to teach age-appropriate gay history and promote positive images of those communities.  Read the rest here on the KCET Ist And Spring blog.

 

Arika Sato is a graduate student at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, which has partnered with KCET-TV to produce this blog about policy in Los Angeles.