Education Policy

The Challenge

The United States faces a school safety crisis the data can no longer let us ignore. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS)—the largest survey of transgender people ever conducted, with 27,715 respondents—found that 77% of those who were out or perceived as transgender in K–12 experienced mistreatment. That is not an outlier. The earlier National Transgender Discrimination Survey (NTDS), published in 2011 with 6,450 respondents, reported that 78% of transgender and gender-nonconforming students out in K–12 experienced harassment.

The specifics are severe. The USTS found that 54% of respondents were verbally harassed in K–12, 24% were physically attacked, and 13% were sexually assaulted. The NTDS reported that 35% were physically assaulted and 12% experienced sexual violence. Most damning: 17% of USTS respondents left school entirely because the mistreatment was so severe. These are not abstract statistics—they represent tens of thousands of young people whose education was cut short by institutional failure.

Meanwhile, politicized legislation is making the crisis worse. Forced outing policies—laws requiring school staff to disclose a student’s gender identity or sexual orientation to parents without consent—are spreading through state legislatures nationwide. These policies put students at direct risk of family rejection, homelessness, and violence. For youth in foster care, the effects compound: frequent school changes, gaps in records, and a lack of educational continuity mean foster youth are far less likely to graduate and far more likely to fall through every crack the system has.

Why This Matters

I grew up in Maine’s foster care system. I know what it means to change schools repeatedly, to arrive in a new classroom with no records and no advocate, to have your education treated as an afterthought by the institutions supposed to protect you. Foster care instability does not pause for school—it compounds the difficulty of learning at every turn.

Later, as a social worker and National Program Director at GSA Network, I spent years working directly with LGBTQ+ young people in schools across the country—27 states, 80 organizations, thousands of students. I saw firsthand what happens when a school is hostile: the depression, the dropout rates, the quiet erosion of a young person’s sense of possibility. I also saw what happens when schools get it right—when a supportive adult, a student club, or a clear anti-bullying policy gives a student room to focus on learning instead of survival.

My graduate training in social work at the University of Southern Maine and my policy research at the Muskie Institute gave me the analytical framework to understand these issues systemically. But it was lived experience—my own and that of the thousands of young people I have worked with—that made the urgency impossible to ignore. When national survey data confirms what you have witnessed in school after school, the case for action becomes unassailable.

What I’ve Done

I served on the research committees for both of the first two U.S. Trans Surveys—the NTDS (2008–2009, published 2011) and the USTS (2015, published 2016). These surveys represent the most comprehensive national data ever collected on the experiences of transgender Americans, and the education findings have been foundational to school safety advocacy nationwide. My role on those committees gave me direct involvement in shaping the research that now underpins federal and state-level policy debates on student safety.

From 2007 to 2012, I served as National Program Director at GSA Network, where I built and ran programs spanning 27 states and coordinated an 80-organization coalition focused on youth organizing and school safety. This was not a messaging campaign—it was the hard, sustained work of connecting local organizations, training young leaders, and building infrastructure for students to advocate for their own safety within school systems that often did not welcome them.

Key accomplishments include:

• Directing a national Safe Schools coalition of 80 organizations across 27 states, building the largest coordinated youth-led school safety network in the country
• Training and supporting student organizers to pass local anti-bullying policies, establish Gay-Straight Alliances, and hold school administrators accountable
• Conducting public policy research at the Muskie Institute in child welfare and education, producing analysis that informed reforms at both state and federal levels
• Advocating against forced outing policies in schools as part of broader transgender rights work, testifying and organizing to ensure that student privacy and safety remain protected
• Supporting foster youth educational continuity through direct service work and systemic advocacy, drawing on both professional expertise and personal experience

Where We Go From Here

The data is clear, and it demands a national response. Protecting LGBTQ+ students requires enforceable federal standards. Forced outing policies must be banned nationwide. Schools must adopt evidence-based anti-bullying frameworks, and districts must be held accountable when they fail to protect vulnerable students. When 77% of transgender students who are out in K–12 experience mistreatment—and 17% are driven out of school entirely—these are not culture-war issues. They are civil rights emergencies.

Investing in K–12 education is not optional. Decades of funding cuts have left schools without the counselors, social workers, and support staff students need. Federal education funding must increase and be distributed equitably, with additional resources directed to Title I schools and districts serving high proportions of foster youth and other vulnerable populations.

For students in foster care, educational continuity must become a national legal priority—immediate enrollment protections, mandatory transfer of records, access to tutoring and mentoring, and a system that treats education as a right rather than an administrative afterthought. The solutions are not mysteries; we know what works. The question is whether we have the political will to fund them and the institutional commitment to sustain them.

Every young person in this country deserves a school that is safe enough to learn in. That should not be a controversial position, and I intend to hold public systems accountable until it is no longer one.