Dr. Elizabethe Payne gives a gay-bullying presentation
The increasing number of gay teenagers committing suicide across the country has caught the attention of some Syracuse common councilors.
Monday night, councilors heard from teachers and Syracuse City School District officials about the conditions in local schools.
School district officials say every city school has a Gay-Straight Alliance group and anti-bullying policies.
They say they are looking into several programs to better educate their schools on how to have a more tolerant environment for gay students.
One of those programs is offered by the The Queering Education Research Institute at Syracuse University. Institute director Dr. Elizabethe Payne says the goal is to give teachers tactics on how to prevent anti-gay bullying.
She says one the biggest problems is that teachers ignore homophobic remarks.
"You hear a number of reasons," Payne says. "One that teachers give often is that they hear it so often if they intervened every time they heard it they would never get their papers graded."
Bernadette DeMott is an English teacher and Gay-Straight Alliance advisor at Henninger high school. She says conditions need to improve at Henninger when it comes to gay students being bullied.
"They don't deserve to feel the pain that they do, when they're thinking about who they are, and they're learning for the first time who they are," DeMott says.
Anyone who wants to learn more about QuERI can contact them on the SU School of Education website or their facebook page.
