Illinois Safe Schools Alliance ( ISSA ) Executive Director Shannon Sullivan will be leaving the non-profit advocacy group at the end of the month. The alliance was established in 2007 with the same mission it has today"to promote safety, support and healthy development for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning ( LGBTQ ) youth, in Illinois schools and communities, through advocacy, education, youth organizing and research," according to its website
A reception was held Nov. 17 honoring Sullivan's career with the alliance, and announcing the Shannon Sullivan GSA Scholarship Fund in honor of her vision, commitment and leadership.
Sullivan began her career 10 years ago with The Coalition for Education on Sexual Orientation ( CESO ), and the Chicago chapter of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network ( GLSEN ), before the two organizations came together to form the Alliance.
In 2007, Sullivan estimated that there were about 80 gay-straight alliances ( GSAs ) in Illinois schools. She said today there are 163.
Sullivan spoke with Windy City Times about her career in safety and education for LGBTQ young people, and her work with ISSA.
Windy City Times: What has been the impact the GSA network doubling in Illinois?
Shannon Sullivan: GSAs are basically the indicator of how safe LGBTQ and allied youth feel or don't feel in schoolsthat, and being able to identify a supportive adult. So we know the power of GSAs in schools. Even if you'd never attend a meeting, just knowing that resource is there shifts the way young people perceive their school environment. Thinking about the doubling of the GSA network between 2007 and today makes me feel like there's a lot more promise for young people entering school and their perceptions of how safe or respected they may or may not be. One of the huge impacts that the Alliance has had is expanding that GSA network outside of the Chicago area.
We started intentionally working in Peoria in 2006-2007. There was not a single gay-straight alliance in or around Peoria at that time. There are eight now. I think that's the power of the work right there.
WCT: At a glance, the Alliance is so involved. You have Night of Noise, legal aid and youth leadership summits. You work with the Legacy Project, About Face Youth Theater and the list goes on. Are there any standouts for you?
Shannon Sullivan: Thank you for recognizing that. Working in partnership and coalition is a value for us. It's the lynchpin of everything that we have been able to do.
There's one that's not as obvious for peoplebecause it's sort of internalbut we have had a research practice partnership and collaborative with UIC's [the University of Illinois at Chicago's] department of education psychology for the whole 10 years that I've been doing this work, both of CESO and then at the Alliance, where we have had access to PhDs led by Dr. Stacey Horn, so that if we want to be able to figure out how do we evaluate our professional development, we've had access to people with that expertise who will sit down together and figure it out.
I think that research partnership has probably been one of the hugest drivers of the quality of our work, and also our depth of understanding of what we need to do and where to go.
WCT: Have you ever had to make any tough choices that put a community's needs ahead of what were maybe institutional goals for the Alliance?
Shannon Sullivan: Yes, and we should. We do tough work, and it's personally and professionally hard. But it is in service of the people for whom it is much harder. It can be adults in communities too, but particularly young people who could be put at risk if there were media attention or some kind of other attention, they have a family acceptance that could be put at risk if we don't do the right thing in the right way.
And that trumps everything, all the time. There have been times where yes, it would have served the purpose of the Alliance to have a media story about something or to advance a policy change and have young people speaking out about that in a certain community.
But if a young person or a family or a community or school is put in any kind of risk in order for us to advance our work, in terms of awareness or funding or our own annual objective goals, then the choice is very clear, and always has been for us.
WCT: In a recent Huffington Post article you talked about the assumption by policy makers and school leaders that LGBT-issues are often controversial, so they often don't act on them. Why do you think that is?
Shannon Sullivan: We use a phrase around here called the vocal minority. What we mean by that isand this has born out over the course of my entire careerthere are always three parents who call a school. It's always three. There could be a school of 3,000 students, there will be three parents who call a school when they hear about a GSA, or somebody took a same-sex date to prom, or they want to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the protected categories in anti-bullying policy.
These three parents are usually very well resourced, very well connected and people that the school has heard from. It is very easy for policy makers, school leaders, to say it's just going to be easier to be quieter on this than to figure out a way to address that vocal minority and still move this community forward.
WCT: Has the academic environment changed at all?
Shannon Sullivan: Absolutely. In many ways. The doubling of the gay-straight alliance alone, I think is such a signal for the type of change that's occurring. Young people are empowered to be active on this, to be leaders of this, to challenge adults. That is tremendously powerful. More and more often we're seeing people coming from supportive families, so their parents are active and engaged as leaders, or their friend's parents. I just think that this sort of societal shift that we've been seeing in terms of acceptance has definitely impacted the amount of support, safety, security, etc. that young people are perceiving, even if it's not directly from their own family or maybe from their school.
We also have the three first gay-straight alliances in middle schools now in the state of Illinois. To have any at all is a huge shift in the movement itself. This is going to grow. The coming out age has dropped younger and younger. So having these supports in place at younger ages is critical in keeping young people engaged and successful in school.
We also have teachers who are now coming out of teacher preparation programs where these issues were included in their coursework. As we get a workforce that's much more prepared and has a much higher level of analysis around addressing these issues in relation to other stuff, that's shifting our school climates as well.
Of course, that has all given way, unfortunately; now we work on the wholesale exclusion of transgender and gender non-conforming students from our education system, because there's no acceptance and no support and no policies and procedures in place to support young people who are working their way through this stuff. School discipline is pushing them out of schools, school administrators are pushing them out of school, because they can't go to the locker room, or use the bathroom, or dress the way they need to dress or use the pronoun that they need to use. There's plenty of work to be done.
WCT: Recently, bullying in schools became a very mainstream topic that was talked about a lot in the media. How do you feel about the way that the conversation played out and the kind of impact it had?
Shannon Sullivan: Like everything, there are great things and not-so-great things about it. It gave greater attention to the issue and increased people's awareness, particularly about the pervasiveness about anti-gay bullying and that it impacts straight kids. That to me was very positive. I have often joked over my career that I identify as a lesbian and I'm out there talking about sexual orientation and gender identity and most of my work is serving to impact the lives of straight kids.
But I think promoting that type of awareness and the pervasiveness of bullying, that it is anti-gay in natureeven if it's not expressly about someone's sexual orientationis positive and has helped us in our work.
And then of course there's also the sensationalism and some of the really tragic suicides that got really played up. I just can't imagine as a family member for those people what that must have been like and is like still. Some of that gives us pause. Of course we want to be in service of a movement, but never at the cost of a life. For myself, there are times where we all just need to let [grieving families] do what they need to do. This is a tragedy and needs to be regarded as such.
And alongside that, this sort of notion of 'We're going to throw all these kids who are bullying into jail! Get them out of the schools!' There's a hyper-knee-jerk reaction that tends to happen when there's a lot of media attention and some sensationalizing of issues. The reality is that the kids who are perpetrating bullying behaviors are in just as much trouble as those young people that have been targeted by them. A response should be to help them understand the consequences and damaging things about their behavior and to do better and do differently and give them the opportunity to practice and build those skills so that everybody can be included in a respectful school environment.
WCT: Do you consider that to be a restorative-justice model?
Shannon Sullivan: We call it restorative discipline here, because the phrase restorative justice means so many things to so many different people. We want to be really strategic about it. And it is one of the things that we advocate when we work with schools to transform their school environment. Detentions, suspensions and expulsions are totally ineffective. The only thing that is actually proven about suspensions and expulsions is that they can possibly increase anti-social behavior between and among young people.
I taught myself, and I did those things myself. And I wonder why wasn't I better prepared in my schooling to realize that these are ineffective and to not utilize them. So knowing that they're ineffective, and understanding that they could possibly only serve to make things worse, we work from the restorative discipline or a restorative practices framework, which means that, yes, in any given instance where harm has occurred in any type of way, be it bullying behavior or physical aggression, what's incumbent upon that community is figuring out how to heal from that harm for everybody.
WCT: In your time working with young people, have you been able to form any lasting bonds as individuals have grown into young adulthood?
Shannon Sullivan: Oh there are so many. I have such a privilege. We've had young people come back in as interns, as staff.
So many people come to mind, but there's a young person who went on to graduate from school in three years and has started her own non-profit. She's a refugee young person herself to this country, working with refugee youth. That is such an example, yeah it's not in the LGBTQ safe-schools movement, but here are young people on the forefront of social justice issues moving forward, utilizing some of the skills and knowledge and development that they did here with us. And that's amazing.
WCT: What's next for you now?
Shannon Sullivan: I'm actually... [Laughs] It's so hard to think about what's next. I still have one more week to get through. There's so much to do!
I hope, of course, to still be doing social justice, anti-oppression work. That's obviously my passion, and certainly, hopefully working somehow alongside young people, whatever that might look like. That has been really important to me throughout my career. Using my own adult privilege strategically, how best to work that. I can't say, specifically; I hope to be more engaged with the work, maybe more broadly. Always including LGBTQ rights and issues, but potentially in a different area, but still involved in really pursuing the guarantee that we all have of equal and equitable treatment in the U.S. Constitution.