The prom controversy that Itawamba Agricultural High School is facing is nothing new. In 1980, Fricke v. Lynch set precedent in United States Federal Court which sided with Paul Gilbert to bring a male partner to his junior prom at Cumberland High School in Rhode Island. Thirty years later, this same issue is being played out in Mississippi in your school district.

Certainly some of you have closely-held opinions, convictions, core-values and beliefs. Based on your ideals, you may feel that a particular viewpoint is morally-correct for your students, yet we are
country in which justice and fairness is administered by Constitutional law at the Federal level, and not administered ad hoc by communities or individual leaders who embrace any particular point of view within any tradition – just as it would be equally unfair for
other communities to impose other standards which curtailed you to experience the same fairness where you find comfort and stability in your freedoms. In these situations, what is being requested is not a new right; it is the uniform application of fairness across the board to all students. Certainly this also puts the board in a difficult situation of preventing disruptions and potentially requiring additional provisions to ensure student safety. The same has held true in generations of black students during racial integration – and while some may resent the comparison, nonetheless the social challenges are the same: safety, community acceptance, preventing disruptions, and
ensuring fairness. The state of Mississippi and the Itawamba Agricultural High School may not be ready for change to accommodate all students. There will be many in the community who will be opposed to anything except the status quo.

Some of you and I could debate for hours, and for both of us, it would be like arguing with the dining room table. The issue of equal treatment will get spun into an issue which lampoons speculation that this issue is “really” about a group of imposters have some supposed
agenda to overreach – and presupposition takes over in the minds of many, that, by accommodating the dignity and fairness to another human being who is different will somehow cascade society in to the moral
abyss. Somehow Rhode Island has survived, and your district will as well. You can take the perspective of fighting against equal treatment, and from a practical perspective, I can actually very much understand this point of view. You can take the perspective of
accommodating the external pressures in your community, and from a political perspective, I cannot imagine the pressures that you must all face coming from different directions — locally and nationally. Faced with pressure, I can understand the action of cancelling the
prom – it appeared to be the safest option.

Sooner or later as time goes on, the Itawamba Agricultural High School Board is going to be faced time and time again with variations of this
issue. As the district has a fiduciary duty to protect the safety of students, anti-gay student bullying may already be an issue that has the potential to expose the district to liability as all students have
the right to an education. Schools districts, gay student groups and the courts have a long judicial history of the courts siding with gay student groups and the rights of students to peacefully assemble.

Certainly you have had a flurry of strong opinions on both sides of the larger cultural war debate on both sides of the issue. From a practical perspective, I agree that no one should expect the Itawamba
Agricultural High School to open the floodgates of acceptance and fairness overnight. It will take time to look at other schools and their progress of dealing with issues of same-gender prom, anti-gay bullying and GLBT student groups. But to ignore these issue and take a hard stance is to invite peril.

For some in the district who would like this issue to go away, or for prom to be a heterosexuals-only event – regardless of my position, your position, your preacher’ position, an conservative activist’ or
liberal activist’ positions – it will take only one look at other districts in the nation for the historical roadmap to be laid out. You can take a position and fight for one side or the other, but
eventually there is only one outcome, which are eventual and slow incremental social changes to extend fairness to everyone. I encourage you to being making the changes to move slowly and cautiously in this
direction. I take a moral position, a personal perspective, a
political point of view, and emotional argument of anger (which I am
sure that you have heard many from both sides), a plea for human
compassion – but at the end of the day, your district has practical
decisions that need to be made that are not based on anyone’s
ideology, but on what makes sense for the district. Immediate fairness
is not always practical to be implemented on that basis, but hopefully
your district will work in the future towards accommodation.

As educators, I am aware that you would like to get back to the
business of reading, writing and arithmetic as soon as possible. The
more that you negotiate traversing this issue with making incremental
accommodations, against the backdrop of people in your community who
are hard-set against any form of accommodation, the easier that this
issue will be to manage equal access to gay students from an
administrative point of view and the sooner that this issue will go
away and you can get back to be business of education and not
ideology. The more that any one extreme viewpoint is embraced -
especially one that is designed to curtail fairness and fence out any
group by creating the perception that they are imposters in your
community, when gay and lesbian youth are American-born and subject to
the same Constitution rights as other students – then maintaining a
position that only embraces the status quo will only invite greater
distractions in the future and create social and legal liabilities.
There is a price to be paid to maintain personal feelings and codify
the same into public policy.

For those of you who may agree with me in spirit also have to
recognize that despite best intentions to embrace fairness, we have a
community who needs to embrace social change at their pace, and for
many, this will be painfully slow. To push too much, too quick without
working to build community consensus and awareness is to invite many
who will gravitate to extremist views and feel vindicated for their
perspectives which express the intent to hurt others, to imply that
“these people” should be stripped of their American-born citizenship
and fenced out of the right to an education or the right to exist and
make positive contributions to society.

We can digress into the spiritual, religious, political, ideological
or other metaphysical realms and make sweeping predictions — but at
the end of the day, the task at hand is to get the troops in line,
work with parents and the community to cooperate with educating our
young, get their little butts in their classroom chairs, learn,
develop and grow into productive citizens to serve Mississippi or
wherever their talents take them. Any other goal outside of this has
its fair place in the arenas and venues of private homes and churches
of every denomination, but as educators, we all know that it is about
the basics, the three Rs, having good test scores, teacher retention
and managing all of this to make it work. Leave ideology where it
belongs and slightly error on the side of caution and fairness.

The smallest action that you take in the direction of fairness
regarding equal access to education will work to your advantage in the
long term. There is over 30 years of judicial history in every state,
and at the federal level regarding gay and lesbian students at proms,
gay student groups and anti-gay bullying and your fiduciary duty to
equal access and student safety. As you work in the same direction to
be on the correct side of history consistent with districts across the
nations, I wish you the best of luck during these difficult times.

Most Sincerely,
Mark

Good Luck,

Steve (Hamburg, Germany)

jnichols@itawamba.k12.ms.us
hmartin@itawamba.k12.ms.us
a082315@allstate.com

hopefully they failed because of the sheer amount of emails that they have received :-)