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Funded by school vouchers, middle school for LGBTQ+ youth to open in Phoenix

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-education/2023/07/24/queer-blended-learning-center-lgbtq-phoenix/70427456007/

The Queer Blended Learning Center, a microschool for middle schoolers, will be housed at the downtown Phoenix headquarters of the nonprofit one∙n∙ten.

Funded by school vouchers, middle school for LGBTQ+ youth to open in Phoenix

The school will be funded by Arizona's education vouchers and housed at the downtown Phoenix headquarters of one∙n∙ten, a nonprofit that serves LGBTQ+ youth. The school's founders aim to give young people who may feel uncomfortable in a larger school a safe space to be themselves and learn. LGBTQ+ history will be on the curriculum.

10 comments

davehtaylor

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This is a very very very bad idea.

Vouchers are poison and used to destroy public education. Trying to spin them into something good is going to backfire, spectacularly.

PostmodernPythia

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Vouchers will happen under our current system no matter what we do. Protecting some LGBTQ+ kids will make no difference to that, but it will make a difference to the kids.

keeb420

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also this might get them to be against the voucher system since it can be used to help lgbtq+ students.

hungrycat

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I’m so conflicted by this. On its face I want to be happy that it’s happening.

I’m not a supporter of public funds for private schools, in general. Large-scale studies have shown that voucher programs can have very modest positive effects or may have significant negative effects on performance. And while these kids are supposedly going to be taking conflict resolution classes, that stuff is harder to put into practice in the real world. If they’re going to be faced with bigotry (and they will at some point), I would say that school is arguably a more controlled environment on the whole to experience it and learn to handle it than a street corner. Removing these kids from the general population also doesn’t do anything to increase the visibility of LGBTQ+ individuals among schoolchildren, especially at this young age when initial impressions and opinions are being formed, nor does it help to dismiss the idea that queer kids are getting the kind of “special treatment” that ultimately has the capacity to breed resentment and homophobia among parents and their kids.

But of course, the primary argument I can think of against all of the above is that LGBTQ+ youth should not be sacrificial lambs for a cause. We need to protect them. We also need to teach non-LGBTQ identifying kids and school administration how to be active allies. And improve resources in all schools. And make every school a safe and welcoming space for everybody.

I’m just so conflicted. In the immediate term, this feels like it’s the right thing to do. But on a longer term time horizon, this looks like it will only cause additional problems down the road, merely addressing symptoms and not root causes.

Djtecha

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This sort of feels like we're headed back to the seperate but equal argument. Something I firmly believes harms us all.

distractedcactus

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Here's an better archive link to the story for anyone who gets a subscription popup on the azcentral site.

I think this is great for the kids that can take advantage of it and a great use of the school voucher program. It would be good to see this in areas like the southeast US where governers are pushing for limiting LGBTQ+ rights instead of against.

EDITED to include a better archive site link from the Wayback Machine.

CaptFeather

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Not sure what's going on, but your archives link slowly fills up with banner ads that keep stacking on top of each other until I can't read the article or scroll the page fyi. There's also no way to close the ads. I'm on mobile so hopefully it's not the same for desktop. Would someone mind copy and lasting the article in a comment though? Got halfway through it before I gave up.

distractedcactus

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Hey thanks for letting me know about that! I use adblock everywhere so I didn't know that site was an ad nightmare. I've replaced the link with one from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine that (as far as I can tell) only has a single pop-up.