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Lesbian Teen Sues School District ; Says Torment By Students Was Allowed By Educators

Posted on: Thursday, 8 September 2005, 18:00 CDT

A lesbian teenager filed suit Wednesday against a Monmouth County school district, arguing it failed to stop her classmates from verbally and physically harassing her for being gay.

For the 2 1/2 years that Nancy Wadington attended Holmdel High School, she said she was the target of taunts and abuse, as students threw bottles at her, urinated in her backpack and pushed her down stairs, all the while calling her "lesbo,""dyke" and "fag."

"For me, going to school was about being humiliated," Wadington said, her voice wavering. "It was not about getting an education."

In her lawsuit before the Superior Court in Monmouth County, Wadington contends that her repeated complaints to officials were fruitless. She argues that by failing to take effective measures to stop the harassment, the district violated her rights under the state's Law Against Discrimination. That law prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation, including schools.

Her case is being handled by Lambda Legal, a national gay-rights group, and by Robert Del Tufo, a former state attorney general who was in office when the state anti-discrimination law was amended in 1993 to prohibit anti-gay discrimination.

Upon learning of the suit, Holmdel Superintendent Maureen Flaherty said the district - a highly regarded system in a wealthy town - would investigate the matter internally.

"I'm confident that the professional cadre at the high school will have addressed things," she said.

Wadington enrolled as a freshman in Holmdel High in the fall of 2001 and was quickly identified by classmates as a lesbian. Almost immediately, male and female students began taunting her with anti- gay epithets - in the cafeteria, classrooms and restrooms. She was pelted with bottles and candy. Her backpack was stolen and found in the boys' bathroom, covered in urine inside and out. Administrators, she said, did nothing.

Her locker was broken into, her school books scattered and spat upon. She alleges that rather than reprimanding perpetrators, school administrators charged her for the destroyed books and refused to issue her report card until she paid for the books.

In despair, Wadington devised a complex route between classes to avoid running into the abusive students, sometimes taking circuitous paths outside the building, even in the cold and rain. She stopped using the school restrooms, for fear of being cornered. She quit changing in the locker room, instead wearing her gym clothes under her school clothes. And she and her mother continued to complain.

"As a parent, you work every day to give your children the best: the best home, the best education, the best opportunities, and above all else, you work to keep them from harm," said Barbara Wadington. "You cannot imagine what it feels like to have your child repeatedly abused by other students and school officials fail to stop it. It was a living nightmare."

By the middle of her junior year, Wadington left the school, opting for a home tutor instead. The district's child study team concluded that continued anti-gay harassment had spurred panic attacks and an acute stress disorder and classified her as "emotionally disturbed." They transferred her to a nearby alternative high school for 12th grade, where she encountered no harassment and her grades quickly improved.

In its lawsuit, Lambda contends that the district failed Wadington and violated the law by removing her from the school instead of making the school a safe place for gay and lesbian students. It argues that by switching her out of the elite school, the district compromised her academic future.

It is not the first time a New Jersey school district has been sued for failing to address anti-gay harassment. In July 2004, the director of the state Division on Civil Rights ruled that the Toms River Regional School District was liable for the anti-gay verbal and physical abuse directed at one of its middle school students. In that case, the director found that even if the school dealt appropriately with each of the many individual offenders, it failed to address the broader anti-gay hostility in the student body.

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Source: Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.

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