This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It was only 17 days ago that we allowed our educators to say homosexuality is OK. That context may explain why some Utah school administrators balked at asking students about their sexual orientation on an anonymous survey.
But that's an explanation, not a justification.
Both Davis and Cache School District officials said they would not distribute the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a joint effort of the Utah Department of Health and the federal Centers for Disease Control, if it included a question about the students' sexual orientation. Rather than risk more defections from other schools would render the data useless, the health department eliminated the question.
In so doing, they passed up the chance to put some science to what is already known anecdotally: LGBT kids are at higher risk, including the risk of suicide. They also gave up the chance to apply data science to finding help for them.
The survey is self-reporting by juveniles, surely a challenge for statisticians, but just having a figure for the number of Utah kids willing to acknowledge they are LGBT would provide validation for the kids themselves. They know they're not alone, but do they know there are tens of thousands of others?
More importantly, the survey seeks information on a variety of risk factors. Students are asked how many times they've been in a car driven by someone who had been drinking, whether they have access to a firearm and whether they had contemplated suicide, among other questions.
Being able to identify populations with multiple risk factors would help schools figure out where they should be most concerned. Then they can formulate more efficient responses within Utah schools' always limited resources.
We still have far to go. That change in the law that the governor signed March 21 removes the requirement that sex education not include "the advocacy of homosexuality," but the change was driven by a court case that Utah was certain to lose. Utah legislators acknowledged as much.
As time rolls on, it won't be the courts driving such changes. It will be the decidedly different attitude among today's young people, the vast majority of whom do not wish to perpetuate a culture where LGBT kids have to hide their identities. And when they don't have to hide, it takes away a key weapon of those kids who still think it's OK to bully them.
A Davis District official said they fear it's too "emotionally challenging" for students to acknowledge their identities in an anonymous survey at school, but that fear says more about the school district than its students. Those emotional challenges come whether LGBT students answer the question or not, and they don't want to be invisible.