Liv Funk couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Last year, during her junior year at a small-town Oregon high school, she says she was injured during a physical assault by students who used homophobic slurs. It wasn’t the first incident in which she’d been called names or threatened because of her sexual orientation. So Funk went to file a complaint with the school resource officer, a police officer assigned to oversee security at her school. His response left her stunned.

“The officer said that being gay was a choice, and it was against his religion,” Funk, who is now 18, recalls. “He said that he had homosexual friends, but because I was an open homosexual, I was going to hell.”

Today, she says she has permanent damage in her hand from being hit with a skateboard during the incident she was trying to report.

It was merely the peak of two years of harassment and fear endured by Funk and her 19-year-old ex-girlfriend Hailey Smith, two students at the high school in North Bend, a town of around 10,000 people located on the Southern Oregon coast. The girls, both of whom said they identify as “queer or gay” and use she/her pronouns, spoke with them. on Tuesday in their first-ever interview with a national press outlet.

Liv Funk Doug Brown

On Monday, Funk and Smith won a massive victory that will help ensure their school becomes a safe environment for LGBTQ+ students in the future. As the result of a lengthy settlement agreement in which both students promised not to sue or file any further complaints against the North Bend School District, the district will undergo a comprehensive slate of initiatives meant to foster inclusivity and dismantle conditions that led to harassment and discrimination.

The students first filed a complaint with the school district itself in 2016, which was followed by an official complaint to the state’s Department of Education. The department conducted an investigation that found several of their allegations to be true, according to excerpts from a March 6 letter from the Oregon Department of Education to the North Bend School District published in local paper The World earlier this month. According to the excerpts, one teacher admitted that he forced students to read Bible passages, while another had earlier been compelled to apologize to a student for comparing same-sex marriage to marrying a dog.