Event One: Strengthening Our Practice: Refining Our Aim __________________________________________________________________________ Ask Us About - 1.2 Miami __________________________________________________________________________
San Francisco HIV Prevention
LGBTQ Website and Posters
There are three main projects that San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and Student Support Services Department (SSSD) would like to highlight:
1) LGBTQ Website - The continuing support given to SFUSD/SSSD teachers, staff, students and families through the maintenance of the LGBTQ website. In April, SSSD opened the first and only school-based website that addresses topics related to LGBTQ youth that includes curriculum, classroom resources, and strategies to help create a safer school environment. See healtheirsf.org/LGBTQ for curriculum, education codes, intervention guidelines, and local community based resources.
2) HIV Education Poster - SFUSD/SSSD’s creation and distribution of an HIV education poster that promotes abstinence, becoming informed, using available resources, and making safe choices. SFUSD YRBS date is used to highlight the number of youth in the district that are choosing not to have sex and make safe choices. Posters were translated into Spanish and passed out to all middle and high schools as part of our December HIV Health Awareness resource. SFUSD/SSSD is currently working on translating the poster into Chinese as well. Poster samples will be brought to the Miami NPD conference.
3) Gay Pride Poster Contest - For at least the last fifteen years, the School Health Programs Department (SHPD) of the SFUSD has implemented a District wide Gay Pride Celebration with some limited success.
In the spring of 2010, in an attempt to gain a student voice in the celebration, and to increase school site participation, we implemented an LGBTQ poster contest for all students, grades Kindergarten-12. The goal of the contest was for students to be involved in the creation of artwork that promotes a more welcoming and safer school for all students, with an emphasis on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, families, and teachers. We also hoped that the youth-generated art would help students to reduce anti-gay slurs and bullying.
Teachers were given curriculum and resources to assist students in thinking about LGBTQ issues and to create posters which would be reproduced for all schools within the District.
The contest was a huge success, with the largest number of submissions from middle school students, where homophobic slurs are reported at the highest level of all grades (87% of students reported hearing anti-gay slurs, YRBS 2009). Four posters were chosen from the hundreds of submissions. As a result, accessing student talent improved the implementation of this year’s Gay Pride Celebration, making it the most successful effort we have had. More schools than ever reported having a school-wide Gay Pride Celebration.
