With the new school year set to begin in Farmington on Aug. 29, Irving A. Robbins Middle School rising eighth graders Miles* and Quentin* are cautiously optimistic.
According to Miles, who identifies as nonbinary, and Quentin, who identifies as transgender, their seventh grade years were fraught with bullying from fellow students and the feeling that school administrators didn’t do enough to protect them and their LGBTQ peers.
They say the harassment and bullying they experienced ran the gamut from microaggressions such as whisper campaigns and stares in class, to being deadnamed and called homophobic slurs, to being urged to commit suicide, to allegedly being assaulted at the end of the school year when a student attempted to pull off a Pride flag that was tied around Miles’ neck.
“Every day in seventh grade I felt unsafe walking into school, walking into every single class, walking to my locker, walking to the bathroom, walking anywhere in the school,” Miles said.
Miles’s and Quentin’s experiences weren’t outliers, according to other Irving A. Robbins Middle School LGBTQ students and their parents. The students and parents said the Farmington School District did not do enough to protect them from frequent harassment, which culminated in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) opening an investigation following a 19,000-word, 54-page complaint filed by Miles’s mother, Melissa Combs.
In the complaint, Combs alleged that the school district engaged in “a pattern of discriminatory actions related to the Gender Sexuality Alliance Clubs at … IAR … and to their gender/sexual identity.”
In a statement sent to The Courant on Saturday night, Irving A. Robbins Middle School Principal Nilda Irizarry said, “While the district has a different perspective on the factual allegations, we respect the process and will be working with OCR to assist them in their review of these issues.”
The OCR’s investigation, believed to be the first of its kind in New England, focuses on seven of the 10 allegations in the complaint.
Farmington Superintendent of Schools Kathy Greider released a statement saying, “The district has received an inquiry from OCR and will be working with them to assist them in response to their inquiry.”
Both Greider and Irizarry also pointed to district policies and work in regard to equity and inclusion. Farmington does not have a transgender/nonbinary policy for its students.
“Please know we take issues related to student civil rights seriously as evidenced by the substantial equity and inclusion initiatives occurring across all schools in furtherance of our commitment to our diverse student body,” Irizarry said in the statement.
The OCR said the opening of an investigation does not imply wrongdoing by the district, but, in an email on Aug. 10, said it was honing in on allegations that the school district did not appropriately respond to several incidents of gender identity or sexual orientation harassment, as well as deadnaming, that were reported in February, March, May and June.
For students and parents, they said the issues run deeper than what the OCR is investigating. Some said it’s a matter of life and death.
Searching for a safe space
Miles didn’t make a big show of coming out as nonbinary last year, but they wanted to be their authentic self. Now they have mixed emotions on whether it was worth it.
“I was getting tired of hiding who I was. … I didn’t want to hide anymore,” they said. “I wanted to meet new people. I’m thankful I came out. I met some amazing people this school year. But then sometimes I regret coming out ever, because I probably wouldn’t have gotten bullied, like if I never came out. I’m glad I can be who I am now — even if I am getting bullied all the time — but at least I can express myself.”
They claim the harassment started in October 2021 but didn’t intensify until December and January, according to the complaint. Miles said they were often verbally harassed with the f-slur, as well as being called “gay girl,” among other things.
Throughout the complaint, Combs alleges that she and other parents were kept in the dark about what was happening at the school.
“When you go to the district’s policies and look whenever a student reports something, the policy says the parent has to be notified,” Combs said. “I’ve never gotten a phone call about anything Miles reported to the counselor. I was never called. My husband was never called and told that our children reported this. If that policy was followed, a lot of us would have known a lot earlier and this would have been a very different experience.”
In March, several incidents occurred, according to the complaint. Several students allegedly ripped off a Pride flag from a wall, stomped on it in front of numerous LGBTQ students and chanted “burn it,” the complaint said. LGBTQ students alleged the school did not address the incident with them, but took down the school’s Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA) Club’s Google Classroom a week later after a student posted about the flag-stomping incident and said that things weren’t going to get better at the middle school, according to the complaint.
That Google Classroom wasn’t even archived or accessible to anyone except for administrators, Combs said in the complaint.
A different Google Classroom was allegedly eventually put up a week later, but with Irizarry and others having access and comments and posting features disabled, according to the complaint.
“The GSA is supposed to be an open conversation to talk about gender and sexuality issues and the stuff that’s going on,” Miles said. “Making it view-only is not helping at all.”
In addition, Irizarry reportedly began attending GSA meetings, something administrators reportedly said was to show solidarity with the LGBTQ community but students said felt like it was an overt effort to monitor what was going on with the club. Irizarry did not frequently attend meetings of other clubs at the school, according to the complaint.
Miles and Melissa Combs also alleged that two trusted GSA advisers were pushed out, according to the complaint.
A former Farmington teacher, who declined to be named and served as an adviser to the GSA after the two advisers were gone, said the administration did make efforts to improve the situation, though they may have fallen short or come across as heavy-handed.
By the end of the year, the GSA, which normally had about 30 students regularly attend meetings, had dwindled to about 10 participants, according to Miles.
“GSA is the only place I felt safe going into school unless it was the counseling office,” they said. “It was the only outlet for everyone LGBTQ to get together.”
Melissa Combs acknowledges that middle school is an often awkward time for children, when, in addition to puberty, students are also engaging in more intense behavior in establishing and jockeying for position in social pecking orders.
Furthermore, she understands that the pandemic not only stunted children’s substantive classroom learning but also their emotional development.
“The kids did not have the social interaction that they normally would have had,” she said. “Fifth and sixth grade are hugely important, as are seventh and eighth. In trying to talk to the district about what was going on, what we heard over and over again is they said, ‘This is the worst we have seen in terms of the harassment and the bullying.’
“You have to ask yourself if a portion of that is related to the pandemic. Even so, if that’s true, that does not relieve the district of providing a safe school environment for these kids. In terms of COVID, the losses seen, the school is trying to do quite a bit to address that.”
But the impact on the LGBTQ kids has been devastating, she said.
“A lot of these kids, their childhood is stolen from them because they have to learn to advocate for themselves at such a young age,” said Combs. “They don’t have the benefit of just being a kid.”
Students struggle with mental health
Quentin began having issues at school while at West Woods Upper Elementary School, primarily in sixth grade, when he said he was nonbinary at the time and told people, including his teacher, that he wanted to go by they/them pronouns.
He says not only did his peers not respect his request neither did his teacher.
When he changed his name from time to time — a common practice as transgender people define their identity — his friends would become angry, he said.
“They were unsupportive about it,” he said. “I was scared to tell them I changed my name again because they’d get mad at me.”
Quentin said he hoped things would get better in seventh grade when he could move on to a new friend group and start fresh.
“I didn’t know anyone else LGBTQ other than two kids” at West Woods, he said. “If I was able to meet more people and relate to more people, it would have been better. I just didn’t have that.”
But that didn’t turn out to be the case at Irving A. Robbins Middle School, either. He said he was targeted by the same group of five or six kids who bullied him frequently.
“I got called slurs in the hallway,” he said. “There was a lot of bullying going on. The three-letter f-slur and the full one. I got made fun of a lot. People would call out my deadname because they thought it would be funny. Every time I reported it to the school they did nothing. It just kept going. It started to actually affect me. It happened so much I couldn’t block it out anymore.”
Quentin’s parents confirmed he was hospitalized several times beginning in October 2021 because of his mental health and made six attempts to take his life.
“I was at the counselor’s office at least twice a week reporting homophobia from the same group of people,” Quentin said.
Quentin said he would not only report incidents to his school counselor Allyson Mooney, but also to Irizarry.
“They would … talk to me about it. I would give them names and talk to them, but otherwise nothing really happened,” he alleged.
“... I just want the school to do more about it and show kids it does affect kids and kids are being told to end their lives in the hallways. That needs to stop. … They need to do more. It’s a matter of life and death. I could have died from any of those attempts.”
Irizarry said in a statement that the school district takes its equity work very seriously.
“The Farmington school district does not tolerate any acts of bullying, disrespect or harassment in our school communities,” Irizarry said in the statement. “We work diligently in partnership with all members of our school community to foster a strong sense of belonging as we know it is critical for all students to feel valued, safe and supported within our classrooms and schools each day. We have openly welcomed student and stakeholder leadership and agency to assist in attaining our diversity, equity and inclusion goals at Irving A. Robbins and across the school district.”
Quentin’s mother shared emails with The Courant in which she communicated with the school district concerning incidents of bullying.
Every time she sees Quentin off to school, she becomes anxious.
“My mind is always racing; it affects me,” she said. “He would text me, ‘Pick me up. It’s horrible. I can’t stand to be here anymore.’”
Quentin is far from an outlier. Nearly 1 in 5 transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide within the last year, while 50% considered suicide within the last year, according to The Trevor Project’s 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health.
LGBTQ youth who experienced anti-LGBTQ victimization — including being physically threatened or harmed, discriminated against or subjected to conversion therapy — reported more than twice the rate of attempting suicide in the past year compared to those who did not have any of these anti-LGBTQ experiences, the study said.
Quentin gets good grades, his mother said, but that’s cold comfort considering how much school he’s lost — some four to five full weeks, and six to eight weeks of half days because Quentin was in an outpatient program for mental health treatment.
“This school year was more about surviving and maintaining mental health,” she said. “He’s intelligent. I’m not worried about academics right now because he will go his own way. He has all the support. We love him. We do everything we can. But then we send him off to school and I don’t know how he’s going to be when he comes back. Is it going to be a good day? Is it going to be a bad day?”
What she wants more than anything is for Quentin to not be afraid to be targeted every day.
“I am worried about Quentin. He’s strong and getting better. Still, it’s like a roller coaster. It will be an ongoing struggle, and I know that. He needs to learn to deal with these people. … There will always be these bullies. We parents, we need more from the school. We need more support to deal with this. I don’t have the feeling the school stands behind us in this case, in supporting the LGBTQ kids.”
School reaction and solutions
Farmington School District officials, citing the OCR investigation, declined to comment on the accusations for this article. Media inquiries of a sensitive nature are handled through the school district’s central office.
“Given the need to protect the integrity of the OCR process and the confidentiality of student information, I hope you can understand that the district is not able to comment further,” Greider said in an email.
During the investigation, the school district may voluntarily enter into a resolution agreement if the OCR deems it appropriate. The OCR could determine the school district has not violated any civil rights law. If, however, the OCR determines the school district failed to comply with a civil rights law, the school district would be offered an opportunity to enter into a resolution agreement. The OCR will monitor the implementation of any agreement.
If the district is found to have violated a civil rights law and does not agree to correct its noncompliance, then the OCR may initiate administrative enforcement proceedings or refer the matter to the Department of Justice for judicial enforcement.
Parents said one measure currently used to de-escalate alleged bullying and harassment in Farmington is a conflict avoidance plan, which both students — the alleged harasser and victim — are supposed to sign and agree to not come in contact with one another. Though the co-signing doesn’t sit well with the parents.
“He is the victim and he has to sign that he will avoid the other kids, too. Both kids will avoid each other, but he’s the victim. Why should he avoid his bully?” Quentin’s mother asked.
Quentin’s mom said she believes the avoidance plans often aren’t enforced, as an alleged harasser can, and has been, in the same class as the victim.
“It doesn’t matter because they’re just going to move them into other teams with other kids they can bully,” Combs said.
Combs said she won’t let Miles sign a conflict avoidance plan.
“I told the school if you put one in front of my child without me knowing, we’re going to have a massive issue,” she said. “We’re not going to victim shame here. Over and over again victim shaming was a theme.”
Quentin’s mother said Irving A. Robbins Middle School officials were supportive in terms of responding to her during the 2021-22 school year about what was going on with Quentin. But she, Combs and Lisa Arenivaz, whose daughter Ashlyn* is a member of the LGBTQ community, said they never had a meeting with Greider about the ongoing issue, though they have sought one.
“You have this vulnerable group of kids where all you have to do is look at the statistics and you know that they are at a higher risk for self-harm and for suicide,” said Arenivaz, whose family moved out of state recently. “That stat seems to be lost on the staff there, the Board of Education and the superintendent.”
Ashlyn’s experience was similar to Quentin’s and Miles’s, with two kids targeting her with microaggressions, comments about her appearance, being called the f-slur and being told to “go die,” said Arenivaz, who shared email messages she sent to school officials documenting the incidents
“I went from having a kid who loved school to having a kid having panic attacks every morning and stomachaches every Sunday night because you knew Monday was coming,” Arenivaz said.
What’s next for the students?
Quentin and Miles say they’re looking forward to the new school year. Along with the OCR investigation, they also know they have their peers and allies in the GSA, as well as some teachers at the school.
In addition, Oliver Przech, a rising senior at Farmington High School who is the president of the FHS GSA, says he will work to have more events between the two schools.
“The middle school and upper elementary years are difficult,” he said, noting that harassment still takes place at the high school level, but there’s less of it. “In middle school, there’s a lot of immaturity in people not liking themselves so they take it out on others. ... In the upper grades people stop. They kind of grow up.”
Miles, for their part, said they’re hoping eighth grade isn’t a repeat of seventh.
“I was happy (the school year) was over,” they said. “But this felt like a waste of a year. ...
“It’d better be better (this year). (The administration) says they’re trying their best, and they better try their … best.”
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* Miles’s, Quentin’s and Ashlyn’s names have been changed to protect their privacy.
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