What Happens When A Middle School Approves An LGBTQ+ Student Club, Then Shuts It Down After Facebook Outrage: A Teacher’s Perspective
The coffee pot in my teacher’s lounge sputtered halfway through my mug last October when a colleague leaned over my shoulder and tapped my screen. “Did you see this over in Appomattox?” she asked. The local parent Facebook thread was blowing up, 700 comments and counting, about Appomattox Middle School’s newly approved Gender Sexuality Alliance, the LGBTQ+ student club a small group of 8th graders had worked all fall to start.
The timeline was simple enough: the kids followed all the district’s rules for starting a new club, secured a faculty sponsor, got formal approval from the principal in early September. Then a local parent posted a screenshot of the approval to the community group, with two lines: “Middle school is too young for this. They’re indoctrinating our kids.” The post was shared more than 1,200 times in three days, and the school board got more than 400 emails and phone calls, most demanding the approval be reversed. Two weeks later, the board voted unanimously to shut the club down before it even held its first meeting.
I’m a 7th grade ELA teacher at a middle school 45 minutes away, and I advise our school’s GSA, so I reached out to a friend who teaches art at Appomattox Middle that night. She texted back a minute later: the three student organizers were in the main hallway when the announcement went over the intercom. One of them, 13-year-old trans girl Lila, just leaned against her locker and cried. Lila had changed her semester schedule to avoid a group of kids who repeatedly teased her about her name, and she’d told my friend she was counting on the club to be a place she didn’t have to watch every word she said. The other two organizers, both queer 8th grade boys, didn’t turn in their homework for a full week after the announcement.
I ran into my neighbor Karen at the grocery store a week later. Karen’s granddaughter goes to Appomattox Middle, and she’d shared that original Facebook post. We ended up chatting in the checkout line while we waited for the cashier to fix a price issue, and I asked her what she thought the club would actually do. She crossed her arms and said, “I don’t want my granddaughter being taught ideas that go against what we believe as a family.” I told her I advise a GSA at my school, and asked if she wanted me to walk her through what we actually do at meetings. Last month, I told her, we spent 45 minutes debating whether the new Zelda game was worth the $70 price tag, and 10 minutes helping one of our members draft an email to the principal asking to update his legal name in the student system. The month before that, we baked chocolate chip cookies for the school’s canned food drive. We don’t talk about sex, we don’t pressure anyone to join, and any kid who doesn’t want to attend is free to go to study hall instead. She twisted her reusable grocery bag in her hands and said, “I never thought of that. I just saw the post and shared it.”
That’s the part of this story that sticks with me, as a teacher and a parent. Outrage spreads so fast on social media that most people don’t stop to ask basic questions before they hit share. The biggest lesson I take from this isn’t about politics, it’s about how we show up for kids, regardless of what we believe.
There are concrete, small things any parent or teacher can do to avoid adding to that kind of unplanned harm. For parents, the first step is simple: before you share a post about a local school club, send a two-sentence email to the principal’s office asking for the club’s official purpose statement and meeting structure. It takes two minutes, and it will give you far more accurate information than any 100-comment Facebook thread. If the school won’t share that information, that’s a fair reason to push back, but most of the time, you’ll find it’s just a group of kids meeting after school to talk about shared experiences, the same as the chess club or the football team.
For teachers who have students asking to start an identity-based club, the small thing that makes a big difference is to explicitly align your club’s rules with every other approved club at the school. If the student council meets once a week after school for an hour, write that your club will do the exact same. If the cheer team can post flyers in the main hallway, ask for the same permission. Putting that in writing upfront leaves far less room for critics to claim it’s “special treatment” when the outrage starts.
For parents of LGBTQ+ kids in districts where this kind of shutdown is common, don’t wait for the school to provide a safe space. Most public libraries offer free meeting room space for youth groups, and many local small business owners will donate a back room or corner for after-school meetups. Statewide youth organizations can also connect you with free, trained adult sponsors if you need one. It’s not the same as having an official school club, but it’s enough to give kids a consistent place to show up.
Last weekend I stopped at that main street coffee shop in Appomattox to pick up a latte on my way home from an errand run. I spotted the group in the back room: Lila was wearing a silver star necklace that matched her best friend’s, and they were passing around a bag of gummy bears while they worked on a poster for a local youth pride walk this spring. The school board still gets weekly emails from both sides of the fight, and the Facebook threads pop back up every other week when someone new stumbles on the original post. No one knows if the club will ever get approved to meet at the middle school. But for now, those kids have a place to go every Friday after school. That’s enough, for now.
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