“If we need a special school for homosexuals, maybe we need a special school for little short fat kids, because they get picked on too.”

— Mike Long, chairman of the Conservative Party in New York, speaking about Harvey Milk High School, the first American high school created for “at-risk” youth and specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning students. The school, located in New York City, is named after the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco who was assassinated in 1978, and it is an extension of a public school program established in 1985 by the Hetrick-Martin Institute.

The school has been tremendously beneficial for some of its students; children that were harassed and ostracized at their previous schools assert that they now have a safe haven in which they can focus on their studies. While little over half of public school students in New York graduate, 95 percent of the students at Harvey Milk successfully do so.

Mimi Hanaoka