Gay, Lesbian Ptsa Forms In Seattle Area

A group of Seattle-area parents and teachers has organized what is believed to be the nation's first PTA chapter created to represent the interests of gay and lesbian parents, students and teachers.

Directors of the Washington State PTA have agreed to issue a charter for the Gay Lesbian PTSA of Greater Puget Sound, which has about 50 members from several neighboring school districts. (Organizations are sometimes known as a PTA, or parent-teacher association, and sometimes as a PTSA, or parent-teacher-student association.)

Susan Carmel, who is president of the new group, said she joined to help spare other families "the utter hell" inflicted on her gay son by his high-school and middle-school classmates in two states.

Jim Carpenter, executive director of the state PTA, said the PTA board welcomed the new group after asking the question, "Does it help build a better world for kids? In this case it does."

The Gay Lesbian PTSA is part of a growing trend toward nontraditional chapters addressing issues that aren't being fully addressed by school-based PTAs, Carpenter said. Other nontraditional groups have been organized by senior citizens concerned about schools, parents of special-education children and parents of preschoolers.

Pam Grotz, executive director of the National PTA, today congratulated the Washington PTA on its acceptance of the gay and lesbian group. "If this organization is in fact going to survive and flourish, we must meet the needs of parents of all children, regardless of their race, religion, creed, background, sexual orientation," she wrote in an e-mail message.

But if PTSAs representing special-interest groups are the wave of the future, Erika Davis Pitre wants no part of it.

"If what we're going for is the black PTA, the Hispanic PTA and the gay and lesbian PTA, I don't support that," says Pitre, a former president of the Seattle Council of PTSA. "There is already enough separation of people's needs. We should come together regardless of our differences and work on solutions together."

Seattle School Board member Ellen Roe has been a member of a PTA since 1954. In her long memory, there have been few if any PTA organizations representing individuals and not schools. She isn't sure if she's opposed to it, but she wonders how it would work.

"Can they go into a school and on an issue concerning gay and lesbians, would their PTA supersede the school's existing one?"

The idea of a Gay Lesbian PTSA was first discussed by an informal group of Seattle PTA members and gay activists two years ago, during a controversy over a Pride Foundation grant for Seattle school libraries to buy books portraying gay and lesbian parents.

An organizing meeting was held last March after the release of a Safe Schools Coalition report that said many same-sex parents are uncomfortable visiting their children's schools as a couple.

The effort was soon broadened to include parents of students who face harassment and ostracism because of their sexual orientation, said Lisa Bond, a regional director for the state PTA and an organizer of the new group.

Karen Tanberg, a Seattle special-education teacher, mother of a lesbian high-school graduate and treasurer of the new PTSA, said anti-gay harassment is commonplace in school: "It's not supposed to go on and we know it's not supposed to go on and it does."