As of late, a petition has been passed around several Rockwood high schools to have sexual orientation included on the list of personal characteristics teachers are protected under to secure job safety.

Ciaran Murdock, senior, was one of the students who helped bring the petition to MHS after it was started by the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at Eureka. He heard about the petition from his friend Jasmine Ehney, senior at Lafayette, and decided to spread the petition around MHS because it’s an issue he really cares about.

“Our country believes in equality and that everyone should be equal, so it’s not right that gay people and people in the LGBT community aren’t protected,” Murdock said. “For teachers especially, they are in a unique position that they are able to encourage young people, so if a teacher is unable to be open about their sexuality they are severely limited in encouraging LGBT youth in their classes to accept themselves and be open.”

Murdock gained signatures by spreading the word of the petition to classmates, recruiting friends to collect signatures and asking students to sign in each of his classes. He and his friends gathered roughly 237 from MHS out of the 500 needed for the administration to look at the petition.

Devin Gordon, freshman at EHS, is the president of the GSA at his school and a founder of this petition. After speaking with several staff members about who were concerned about the policy, they decided that change needed to happen.

“We created an online petition on change.org and we started a hard copy petition as well to spread through our school to others in Rockwood,” Gordon said. “We collected signatures by going up to people and asking them to sign.”

Between all participatory schools and the online petition, more than 1,225 signatures were collected in support of the revision.

“We didn’t really have a goal because we just wanted to collect as many signatures as we could,” Gordon said. “There’s really not a set amount for petitions, you just try to gain as much support as possible.”

On Thursday, May 7, Gordon and other members of GAS from Lafayette and Eureka presented the petition to the Rockwood Board of Education in a three minute speech at Crestview Middle School. They detailed the specifics of what they would like to change, the reasoning behind their cause and why everyone deserves equal protection. Throughout this entire petition process, students involved received an overwhelming amount of support from both students and staff alike from around the entire district.

“We had barely anyone who refused to sign, and if they did they didn’t make a scene,” Gordon said. “It was very empowering.”

Even though it may not explicitly stated, Rockwood policy is that all teachers are legally protected against discrimination and cannot be seen as different on account of sexual orientation. During the hiring, firing and evaluative process, sexual orientation plays no part in the administration’s decision making process.

“We’re looking for highly qualified teachers,” Superintendent Dr. Eric Knost, said. “If there are obvious reasons that may make the person diverse in a way that would make our student experience and culture in our schools a more rich experience then we’re definitely going to consider that.”

Recently, the district has taken steps to ensure the equal treatment of students who identify as transgender to ensure that every student and staff member has the chance to succeed in the district. “It’s easy for people who aren’t of a group that maybe feels unprotected,” Dr. Knost said. “I think we need to listen when there are concerns, and if we can clean something up, tweak it or add something to it to make people feel their voices are heard its important stuff.”

In this situation, the likely process of this petition becoming an official amendment to the policy would go something like this: the request is presented to the board, the board would seek the advice of the superintendent, he would agree to revise the current legislation, the district would spend several weeks in a review and speaking with the district’s attorneys to get some recommendations, it would go back to the board for a second read and then back again for approval. The entire process would most likely take around 30 days to a few months to be completed and put into effect.