SARANAC LAKE — The Saranac Lake Central School District Board of Education spoke on Wednesday about a group of teens’ recent criticisms of the district’s handling of bullying and harassment, specifically relating to LGBTQIA-plus students.

On Monday, five local students, some of whom are part of the LGBTQIA-plus community, spoke at a community discussion put on by the Adirondack North Country Gender Alliance and Saranac Lake Youth Center about facing repeated bullying, sexual harassment and physical attacks while at school.

The students were critical at the event of some school staff, and SLCSD Superintendent Diane Fox said school staff were offended by what the students said. She defended district staff on Wednesday.

“We have a lot of staff members today who are sad because they felt that they had really stepped up and tried to be an advocate for our kids and felt a little slammed by that,” Fox said. “I’m one of them.”

The forum and the district’s response shows a disconnect between what the administration sees as good Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging advancement — with their DEIB committee helping guide policies — and what the the students see as continued harassment, bullying and discrimination.

Because of their identities, the students said Monday that they have heard hurtful comments from teachers and students, have been shoved into lockers or down stairs, and have been called slurs. They said they’ve been forcibly outed by peers or adults. One of them said they seriously considered suicide at one point.

The teens act nonchalant about it, but they also said it wears on them heavily.

One student said on Monday that they “don’t really have trusted adults in the high school or middle school” and that “the adults who were supposed to protect us have failed time and time again to protect us.”

On Thursday, some of the teens said they don’t expect anything to improve. They believe their concerns will get “swept under the rug.”

Fox said the staff are doing good work and she’s proud of them.

“It’s a difficult situation because I want to honor our students who had something important to say,” Fox said Wednesday. “But I also want to honor the agreement I made with staff on our opening day.”

This agreement, relating to the relatively recent introduction of DEI, was that it is “difficult work,” that there would likely be “missteps” and that if someone missteps but has good intention, Fox and the board would “have their back.”

Fox said a lot of school employees have been nervous about the DEI work they’re being asked to do. They’re not sure they’re always using the right pronouns or vocabulary. She worries that this criticism will mean they’ll step around the work or step back and not keep pushing it forward.

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‘A disconnect’

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Fox said she was not pleased with the way the students were put in the public forum, saying it’s an emotional time for young kids.

“It sometimes can have you speaking things that, once you get going and you’re nervous, you just keep talking,” Fox said. “They’re kids put into a situation that was very difficult by trusted adults.”

The students said on Thursday that they had wanted to hold this forum.

The teens said their goal wasn’t to make people angry; it was to make change and to make people notice them.

“We go so unnoticed. We made ourselves big and we made ourselves bold and we made ourselves there,” one said.

Some of the students said they saw older siblings and their siblings’ friends bullied into silence or “pushed back in the closet” in school and could not be out until after graduating.

“We’re speaking for the people that got silenced,” one said.

Fox said much of Monday’s conversation on bullying is real or, at least, “how they perceived it.”

“As we know, how you perceive it is your reality,” Fox said.

But she said what was said about staff not being responsive or being part of the problem, she doesn’t agree with.

“That is simply not true,” she said.

She said there’s been missteps, but there’s also been misinterpretations.

On Thursday, the Enterprise spoke with some of the students from the forum, who asked to remain anonymous this time to avoid retaliation. They said in the days after the forum they’ve experienced backlash from teachers at their school who were offended by what they said. They said they were told they don’t have evidence for their complaints.

The students were clear: Their complaints don’t apply to all teachers.

Kelly Metzgar is a member of the district’s DEIB committee and executive director of the Adirondack North Country Gender Alliance. She said its members are sincere in their desire to make things better, but that there is clearly “a disconnect” in what they are trying to accomplish and what the kids are experiencing.

Metzgar felt the forum was a positive, needed and long-awaited thing.

“The students were given an opportunity to voice their real-life experiences,” she said. “I think this was a time for the students to actually say what their feelings were. So often, their opinions are dismissed by adults.”

She added that LGBTQIA-plus students are often further marginalized and dismissed.

Metzgar said if school officials don’t like what was said, the kids were just being open and honest. If most cases of harassment go unreported, as the teens said, she asked how school officials can know how bad things are.

“If you like it or not, this is happening,” she said. “If the kids aren’t reporting it, it’s probably because they don’t feel safe.”

SLCSD board member Joe Henderson said while reading about the forum, his thoughts went to a 2021 protest at Paul Smith’s College, where he works, when he heard similar statements from students — that only certain authorities on campus hear their concerns and that incidents of harassment are under-reported.

He said the college’s response to the protest was a “mixed bag” of success.

Henderson said there is a “culture of active hostility” toward LGBTQIA-plus students because of their identities, both in the public and among this country’s political leaders. He said that shouldn’t be the case at school.

“If (anyone is) going to be actively hostile to these students, I don’t want them working here,” Henderson said.

This event also follows multiple instances of anti-LGBTQIA-plus vandalism in Saranac Lake over the past few years, many of them targeting Metzgar specifically. Metzgar, who is arguably this region’s most vocal advocate for LGBTQIA-plus rights and a proud transgender woman, has had a Pride flag at her home repeatedly torn down.

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Reporting bullying

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On Monday, the teens expressed frustration about what they see as a lack of action to protect them and a lack of real consequences for students who bully them.

Fox said just because school officials can’t or won’t say what they’re doing in response to reports, doesn’t mean they’re not doing anything. She was adamant that the district takes action when complaints are lodged, but she said they can’t share with students the consequences for people who have hurt them. SLCSD board President Mark Farmer said that when this happens, the students who were hurt can feel like nothing happened.

One student said they don’t need to know the student’s been punished. They need to know the harassment will stop.

“We don’t want to be told it is happening. We want to see it ourselves,” they said.

The students are risking potential retribution by reporting bullying, so they said they want to be sure something happens to keep them safe. If they don’t see that, they said they don’t report bullying. On Monday, one student said 95% of bullying goes unreported.

This sentiment was confirmed by student representatives to the board Sam Clark and Elijah Schenk, who said bullying happens that staff is unaware of.

Students said punishments are sometimes seen as rewards. In-school or out-of-school suspension is not really a consequence for some. Farmer said they have a limited menu of punishments.

Even if a consequence is seen as such, Clark said it often doesn’t change anything to deter that student’s bullying behavior. Clark said the district has to get it right for everybody’s sake.

The students at the forum on Monday asked for the school to pursue “real punishments” as well as education for the perpetrators.

On Thursday, the teens clarified what this means. Instead of just suspension, they feel it would be more productive to have the offending student talk to the teacher who runs the Gender-Sexuality Alliance to get educated on the offense, the hurt they caused and what it means to be LGBTQIA-plus. Some also called for a more serious mark on their record.

They universally called for a public standardized set of punishments for discrimination.

On Monday, students said they were not aware of the rights they have.

The state’s Dignity for All Students Act has a process to file complaint claims about harassment, bullying or discrimination, which are investigated by the district’s DASA coordinator — the district has a number of coordinators in the different schools.

Students are notified of these rights in a pamphlet at the start of the year, and the district’s website has a link to the information, along with an anonymous reporting tool.

Metzgar said a pamphlet is not enough. No one reads those. She wants to hold a DASA training so the students can know their rights.

Most said they didn’t know about DASA until they started talking about it with adults from the Gender Alliance and the Youth Center. They want to be educated on it, but they also want others to be educated on the law, to ensure it is abided by.

Metzgar said they can only educate people so much. They also need consequences for people who break the rules.

This is a society of laws, she said, whether people agree with them or not — adding that there are laws she doesn’t like but follows.

The state Department of Human Rights takes this seriously, she added.

Fox said the district has a process for students to make name or pronoun changes. She said they’ve had staff members who refuse to conform to students’ gender identifications, which is “insubordination” and results in a write-up.

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Inciting incident

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This discussion comes after an incident last month, when the parent of a Saranac Lake student athlete, Eric Wilson, mistook a student athlete on an opposing team as a transgender girl. While attending a flag football game between Saranac Lake and AuSable Valley, Wilson made derogatory comments on social media about that student, calling the student an “it” and a “thing with a penis.” Some responses to his post encouraged violence against the student. Wilson has since apologized, but the incident sparked responses from both Saranac Lake and AuSable Valley school officials.

The panelists and co-moderators stressed throughout Monday’s event that their goal was not to speak about one specific incident but rather to bring attention to the broader picture of widespread discrimination and harassment of LGBTQIA-plus people around this region and New York state.

On Monday, students said they didn’t think the SLCSD’s statement did anything. Several students and adults have asked for any actions the district took relating to this incident to be made public.

SLCSD board member Tori Thurston said because of school board policies and laws, they cannot talk about consequences themselves.

Fox said she could share this information, but she’s choosing not to because it is not typical to do so.

Wilson was not the first parent to be disciplined for conduct at a sporting game, and these consequences are not usually made public. She said she doesn’t think it’s fair to “pick and choose” which ones are made public, and she’s not comfortable picking where that line is.

She gave the example of students who speed through the parking lot to pick up their girlfriends.

“Should I be putting that out to the public that the 19-year-old is driving through the parking lot like a maniac?” she asked.

It’s a matter of “personal integrity,” she said.

Besides, Saranac Lake is a small town and word will get around anyway, she added.

“It’s not my job to bury somebody who has misbehaved,” Fox said. “Part of what we do in school is say, ‘Once you’ve served your consequence, you start fresh.'”

Metzgar said a parent harassing a child, which affected a lot of people at a public event, is different. She feels that because it was such a public violation of the rules and safety, the response should be public, too. Otherwise, she said public perception is that it was swept under the rug.

Making the consequences known would mean a lot for the kids, the community and to anyone who might do something similar in the future, she said.

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‘We need to do better’

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Students said they’d like more school officials to attend their events — like the forum on Monday — to hear them out.

“Be there,” one said.

SLCSD board member Nancy Bernstein said that these students felt comfortable enough to speak means things are improving. That feeling would not happen everywhere, she said.

“We need to do better,” Bernstein added.

The board was in agreement that there’s still a lot of work to be done. They also said the school is only a portion of the community, and the community as a whole has work to do.