Email Share 330 Shares

Student leaders of the Gay-Straight Alliance club at Cape Henlopen High School in Lewes, Del., say the group and its faculty adviser have been subjected to unfair and discriminatory treatment by the school’s principal and assistant principal in a series of actions over the past two months.

GSA co-presidents Alli Payne and Elena Campbell, both seniors, told the Washington Blade in email messages and phone interviews that school officials appear to be imposing restrictions and close scrutiny over the group, including a requirement that they meet just once every three weeks, that aren’t imposed on other student clubs.

The two said between 80 and 100 students regularly attend GSA meetings, making it among the largest student groups at the school.

“A huge issue that is affecting our group is the consistent attacks on our adviser, Martha Pfeiffer, who consistently only tries to protect the rights of our LGBT student body,” Payne told the Blade in an email.

In a phone interview earlier this month, Payne and Campbell said they were angered and dismayed when they learned that Pfeiffer, a teacher who heads the school’s theater department, had been reprimanded for attempting to help a GSA member who told Pfeiffer and fellow GSA members that he was being emotionally and physically abused by his parents because he’s gay.

“He came to Mrs. Pfeiffer and said I need your help,” Payne said. “And we were present so that’s why we know of the support” Pfeiffer attempted to provide him, Payne said.

“And she tried to get him in touch with just someone who could help him,” Payne continued. “And they claimed she was trying to help him run away from home, which was completely false,” Payne said of school administrators.

Payne and Campbell said a close friend of the gay student told them later that the student’s parents removed him from school and brought him to Nebraska, where they enrolled him in a program run by an anti-gay group to attempt to change his sexual orientation from gay to straight.

GSA member Bruce Shelton told the Blade in a separate interview that he believes he was unfairly suspended when he “verbally” defended himself against a female student who called him a “faggot” in class earlier this year. Although the student who called him the anti-gay slur was also suspended on grounds of disrupting the class by arguing, the teacher of the class and a school administrator who was called to the scene made no attempt to say anti-gay name-calling is off limits and isn’t condoned by the school, Shelton told the Blade.

Shelton, who identifies as gay, said a teacher at the school caused him to suffer considerable emotional distress when she told him at the time he was a freshman that he was too young to know whether he was gay.

According to Shelton, Family and Consumer Sciences Department teacher Alayna Aiken approached him during a break in a school Challenge Day diversity group session, for which she served as group leader. He said he came out as gay to fellow participants in the group session.

“And she told me that I wasn’t gay, that I couldn’t know that I was gay and that the gay lifestyle is one of the most disease-ridden lifestyles there is,” Shelton said.

Michael Kelley, director of curriculum and instruction for the Cape Henlopen School District, said that Principal Brian Donahue, upon learning about the allegation through the Blade, would investigate Shelton’s report of Aiken’s comments to him by meeting with Shelton and Aiken.

“Please understand that further comment on the matter cannot address details of any possible disciplinary action against the teacher or the student, as such would violate their rights to privacy,” Kelley said.

Since the start of the fall semester Payne and Campbell said they and other GSA officers have been summoned to meetings with Donahue, Assistant Principal Michael Young and Cape Henlopen School District Superintendent Robert Fulton.

Young’s request that they meet with him with less than an hour’s advance notice came on the day after the Blade contacted Donahue and a school district official for comment about the concerns raised by Payne and Campbell related to the school’s treatment of the GSA.

Young, among other things, pressed them at the meeting to make changes in their planned activities for the remainder of the school year, the students said. At an earlier meeting to which they were called by Donahue, the principal admonished them against promoting their “personal agenda” during GSA meetings, Payne and Campbell told the Blade.

The two said they were troubled by Donahue’s suggestion that they were imposing their own agenda on the GSA membership, a suggestion they consider unfair and unfounded.

In another development, Payne said the administration asked Pfeiffer to fill out a form that asked what the GSA’s goals were and why the group would be helpful to the outside community.

“No other group adviser we spoke to was asked to fill out such a form, and we can’t help but feel attacked by this,” Payne said.

Kelley said that at the time Pfeiffer was asked to fill out the form there was no description of the GSA’s purpose and mission on the school’s website. He said clubs and student organizations are listed on the website and the administration wanted the information to include a description of the GSA. He said also at that time a school district official was “completing paperwork” for a statewide GSA conference that required such information.

However, a source familiar with the school and the GSA said Pfeiffer, with the help of GSA members, had already submitted information about the group’s mission and goals along with other information and that the request that she submit yet another report with the same information appeared to be a form of harassment.

Meanwhile, Payne and Campbell said the school administration has not been responsive to the GSA’s suggestions that the school improve its response to LGBT students who report being bullied or harassed by other students.

Kelley said Donahue expressed the belief in his meeting with Payne and Campbell that the GSA “is a great group that can help bring students together and has added to the positive climate in the school by educating students and staff.”

But he added that Donahue also “cautioned that allowing personal agendas to emerge could have an adverse effect on the group’s good intentions.”

Kelley said the school and the school district do not believe there is any basis for claims that GSA adviser Pfeiffer is under attack by the school administration.

Concerning the GSA leaders’ complaints that the school was requiring them to meet only once every three weeks, Kelley said meetings during the school day present a scheduling challenge because some students belong to more than one club.

“The reins have been pulled on all clubs, not just the GSA,” he said. “Most clubs choose to meet before or after school.”

Concerning the school’s suspension of Bruce Shelton, Kelley said, “We cannot comment on a student’s discipline record other than to say that appropriate consequences are bestowed on students following an investigation by administration in compliance with Board [of Education] policy and the student code of conduct.”

Linda Gregory, president of the Rehoboth Beach-Lewes chapter of PFLAG, a national group that advocates for parents and allies of LGBT people, said several of the Cape Henlopen GSA members came to a PFLAG meeting earlier this month to appeal for help in what they said was the unfair treatment they and Pfeiffer were receiving from the school’s administration.

“The first-hand accounts of what is going on at the high school toward the GSA officers and students and adviser from administration, staff, and other students were horrifically discriminatory and abusive,” Gregory told the Blade.

She said that as word began to spread about the GSA students’ plight in the Lewes-Rehoboth communities, members of the clergy at a Unitarian Universalist Church and an Episcopal Church in Lewes and the Epworth United Methodist Church in Rehoboth Beach, among other clergy, contacted Cape Henlopen High officials to express concern about the students’ complaints.

It couldn’t immediately be determined what school officials told the clergy members. But Gregory said GSA members were pleasantly surprised on Dec. 19 when the school issued an email announcement saying the administration had approved a request by the GSA that its seniors be allowed to wear rainbow-colored stoles around the shoulders of their graduation gowns during the graduation ceremony next June.

The action marked a reversal of a decision by Donahue in the spring denying the GSA’s request to let graduating seniors who were members of the GSA wear the rainbow stoles. At the time, Donahue told the Blade the school’s longstanding policy limited the wearing of stoles to academic and service-oriented groups such as the Honor Society and Future Farmers of America.

Gregory said the school’s reversal on the rainbow stoles issue was a positive sign.

“That is a gift for Christmas for all of us,” she said. “That says progress has been made.”

The latest developments surrounding the Cape Henlopen GSA follow a decision in June by the Delaware Human Relations Commission to open an investigation into whether the school has engaged in unlawful discrimination against LGBT students.

A Commission member said the investigation was prompted by a Blade story in May that reported concerns raised by GSA members and sources familiar with the school that LGBT students were being subjected to discrimination.