A gay-straight alliance at Chambersburg Area High School in Fulton County in Central Pennsylvania will finally be able to launch after the school district reversed its decision to ban the group last week. The district’s board voted 5-4 March 27 to allow the formation of the group, a turnaround from the 5-4 decision one month previously that denied the student application for the club. The students originally came to the school board in January to get the GSA approved but the vote was pushed back to February 27. LGBT students at the high school had been meeting for two years unofficially as a club, with faculty members serving as advisors, before they decided to seek official recognition for the GSA. Both Equality Pennsylvania and the American Civil Liberties Union threatened the school with a lawsuit if the school board did not reverse its decision by last week. The organizations said they would pursue a suit under the Equal Access Act of 1984, which prohibits public-education institutions from denying access of fair opportunities to students who seek to conduct a meeting. Equality PA executive director Ted Martin said he believes the law played a large part in the school board’s decision. “I think a lot of reality hit their decision. The fact of the matter is that under the law, they simply can’t do what they intended to do,” he said. “When all rhetoric is gone, they faced legal action and I think that quickly brought them to their senses. It is important to have the law on your side and the beauty of this is, for once, we would point to the law.” Martin said the district was open to discussing the issues. “I had a few conversations with the superintendent and everything was very civil. We can disagree without being disagreeable,” he said. The students who spoke up in favor of the GSA should get most of the credit, he added. “These are young people in a place that may have not been accepting of them, who publicly fought for what they knew was owed to them and moved forward,” he said. “That is the truly the remarkable part of this. That is the point: They were the ones who moved this forward.” The school board did not respond to multiple requests for comment by PGN as of presstime.
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