Gresham-Barlow School District agrees to pay transgender teacher, add gender-neutral bathrooms after complaint

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#1 | Gresham-Barlow School District agrees to pay transgender teacher, add gender-neutral bathrooms after complaint datum

Wed May 25, 2016 2:46 am

This might seem crazy, but hey, it's Oregon.

Zitat
The Gresham-Barlow School District has agreed to pay $60,000 and make sweeping changes across its nearly two dozen campuses after a transgender elementary school teacher complained of more than a year of harassment from coworkers.

Leo Soell, a fifth-grade teacher at Hall Elementary School, came out as transgender last spring after surviving breast cancer.

The harassment started soon after, Soell said in a complaint submitted to district officials, and continued even after the school hosted an hourlong training on transgender issues.

Soell identifies as neither male nor female and uses the pronoun they instead of he or she. But, Soell wrote, coworkers continuously called Soell "she," "lady" or "Miss Soell." Someone smeared Vaseline on Soell's cabinets, the complaint said, and another yelled insults in the school hallway. Others conspired to prevent Soell from using the school's lone gender-neutral bathroom, the complaint said.

A district investigation, which officials have declined to release, found no proof of harassment.

[snip]

If kids asked whether Soell was a boy or a girl, district leaders told Soell to respond, "We all have private lives, and it would not be appropriate to talk about our private lives during the school day." A district spokeswoman last year said administrators were worried about "age appropriateness."

Soell said coworkers responded by intentionally calling Soell "lady" or "Miss Soell."

"Another teacher yelled at me openly in the school hallway, saying that my gender is a 'belief system' that I do not have the right to make other people follow and that God is on her side," Soell said in a complaint, obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Soell and the teachers union filed a grievance last school year. Over the summer, union representatives negotiated a deal that allowed Soell to go by "they" at school.