Youth deserve the right to be educated, to educate, to be empowered, and to empower, regardless of their sexual, racial, religious, or ethnical identities. They furthermore deserve the right to feel safe and protected in an environment that lets them be themselves without any fear of intimidation or unchecked ignorance. While the US has come a long way in ensuring that those rights are protected, especially in the areas of racial and ethnical inclusion we still have a long way to go in providing children the right to be LGBTQ or Pansexual and to practice the religions that matches their ideologies.
However, youth that are LGBTQ or Pansexual are amongst the group that much concerned should be geared toward. These youth, faced with rampant rises in homelessness, parental abandonment, psychological abuse from adults and peers, and sometimes-physical abuse coupled with weak understanding of laws like McKinney Vento are youth that we risk leaving behind in a system that waits for no one. This risk grows when the academic environment becomes the secondarily hostile environment for these youth for the simple fact that they already face hostility at home and the one place they come to be empowered does the exact opposite. Therefore when these youth, unlike Black, economically disadvantaged, or learning disabled students, receive no extra attention even though they face obstacles that are just as great compared to students in those groups it puts them in a position to feel like they are being left behind.
So the questions become: Do youth who are LGBTQ or Pansexual need greater protections, more resources, and monitoring from the US Depts. of Education and Justice like children in other “At risk” groups? Would greater protections, resources, and surveillance help these youth in the end? Would greater protections, more stringent surveillance, and more resources help educators and education officials with understanding the unique challenges that these youth face?