IL: High School Diversity Club Struggled With Students Attending to Disrupt

A conservative activist group filed a FOIA targeting the advisor for Waterloo High School’s sexuality and gender focused diversity club. They found evidence of the toll politicization of schools and demonization of trans students has taken.

by Evan Urquhart

A press release about the results of a public records request by conservative activist group Parents Defending Education was written up by the Daily Wire as if it looked bad for its target, but instead provided a window into the way conservative political organizing is making schools less safe for LGBTQ+ students. The group published some of the emails they received from a public records request which involved Gender and Sexualities Alliance groups. They found teachers sharing forms they use to ask students about their pronouns with one another, and advisors for GSAs asking advice from the group in handling challenges.

One such challenge highlighted by PDE and turned into a story on the Daily Wire involved hostile students attending meetings at the height of conservative actions over bathroom policies in one high school in Waterloo, IL. The headline says “Illinois School ‘Diversity’ Club Sponsor Sought To Exclude Students Upset Over Trans Bathroom Policy,” a creative way of saying that Waterloo High School’s LGBTQ+ group, called Diversity Club, was dealing with students attending the meetings for the purpose of disrupting them.

That at least seems to be what the group’s advisor was dealing with when she wrote, in an email to the listserv, “I have a meeting with the club tomorrow. Usually, our meetings are open. Unfortunately, some of the main players who are in favor of keeping transgender students out of the bathrooms are students who have been coming to meetings under the guise of support for our queer kids.   I'm meeting with our administration today, but I was hoping for some advice about how to handle the meeting tomorrow. Do any of you have experience with monitoring who can and who cannot attend meetings?”

The email is dated March 21, 2023 and it links to a March 2023 story in the local Belleville News-Democrat describing tension and protests at the school over a policy allowing trans boys to use the boys’ bathrooms. Waterloo High School formalized a policy in 2022 in order to align with state law, allowing trans students to use the facilities that align with their gender identity. While the right-wing media’s attacks on the trans community were at their height in March 2023, the policy became a point of heated contention at the school. When some cisgender boys expressed discomfort at sharing a bathroom with a trans boy were given the option of using a private restroom in the nurse’s office, but instead of doing so they coordinated with one another to all line up for the nurse’s bathroom at once, with other students joining a line that reportedly stretched to 135 students, according to the News-Democrat.

Some of these students, it appears, took their protest to meetings of Diversity Club, the name given by students for Waterloo’s GSA, which youth wanted to be maximally inclusive and to deal with topics beyond gender and sexuality. The advisor for the group asked for advice from other faculty advisors for Illinois GSAs about how to handle that situation. PDE’s release included an email response suggesting that the advisor post expectations for behavior in the group and stick to specific activity, or else temporarily close the group’s meetings to regular attendees.

A 2021 story on Diversity Club for the Waterloo-based Republic-Times newspaper described the group as a safe space where anybody could find support, and a quote by one of the student officers at the time, Bee Steed, hinted that such support was sorely needed saying “There is a lot of hate in this school and I feel like everybody just needs a safe space to go if needed.” The attendance of students whose primary aim was to advocate for a change in bathroom policies that would negatively impact other students would seem to be a poor fit for this mission.

It’s unclear how the tensions over school bathroom were resolved in Waterloo, or if anti-trans students crashing Diversity Club meetings ever presented a problem.