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January 6, 2004 02:33 PM ET
Reuters.com
By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Six students who said school officials mostly ignored their complaints that other students had taunted them with anti-gay remarks will receive $1.1 million under a settlement announced on Tuesday.

Alana Flores and five other students in Morgan Hill, 12 miles south of San Jose, California in Silicon Valley, had claimed that the school did not provide them with equal protection under the law.

"I am so happy that the district has finally recognized the seriousness of this problem and is ready to do something to stop it," Flores said in a statement. "The kind of abuse I had to deal with every day when I went to school was horrible. No student should have to face that."

The legal fight by the five girls and one boy dating back to 1998 received a major boost last April when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled there was a good chance a jury would find that school officials had violated the students' rights.

The students charged that school administrators had responded to their complaints in a discriminatory manner to what is, after all, the common growing-up experience of bullying. One recent Journal of the American Medical Association study found that 30 percent of public and private students in a sample group in grades 6 to 10 either bullied others or were bullied themselves.

Students taunted by their peers as gay have launched a growing number of lawsuits nationwide in recent years against schools, and some have won settlements in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, said John Campbell, co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Political Action and Support Group in New Jersey.

"We are getting settlements and everybody is getting more aware of the fact that if you don't do the job now of protecting the kids you're going to pay a price for it," he said.

Stuart Biegel, a professor of law and education at UCLA, said the core issue in these cases is that educators must respond to all instances of bullying in an equal way.

"What we're finding in regard to the gay student bullying cases is that too often school officials look the other way. And you even have instances in reported cases in the mid-90s where school officials actually blamed the kids for being too openly gay," he said.

"There was one case out of Nevada where the principal actually told the kid 'Stop acting like a fag,"' Biegel said. "This is the kind of thing that the courts are increasingly recognizing is not acceptable."

Under the latest California settlement, the school district in Morgan Hill, population 33,000, will also start a training program for staff and students to fight anti-gay harassment.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.