 Reach And Teach is thrilled to have been invited to participate in several Bay Area (California) gatherings designed to help create more inclusive environments in schools. Our Family Coalition has been working for many years to make ALL schools welcoming places for ALL children, with a particular focus on children in GLBTQ-led homes. Click here to check out Our Family Coalition's web site.
Through these events, we've learned about the Welcoming Schools program, which is working to help make schools across the United States more welcoming of all children. Here's how they describe themselves on their web site: Welcoming Schools is an LGBT-inclusive approach to addressing family diversity, gender stereotyping and bullying and name-calling in K-5 learning environments. Welcoming Schools provides administrators, educators and parents/guardians with the resources necessary to create learning environments in which all learners are welcomed and respected. The Welcoming Schools Guide offers tools, lessons and resources on embracing family diversity, avoiding gender stereotyping and ending bullying and name-calling. The primer version of the Guide, An Introduction to Welcoming Schools, is a 93 page resource available for download in its entirety. Welcoming Schools has been piloted and evaluated in three school districts in Calif., Mass. and Minn. With the completion of the pilots, the project will move toward broader distribution of the Welcoming Schools Guide. Initiated by a group of parents and educators to meet the needs of students whose family structures are not well represented or included in school environments, Welcoming Schools is also a response to educators who have asked for tools to address bias-based name-calling and bullying. Additionally, it offers a wide range of resources for school administrators and educators to support students who don’t conform to gender norms.
We here at Reach And Teach have checked out the curriculum and the other resources Welcoming Schools has to offer and feel they are terrific. While we've had a great set of resources for gender equality / GLBTQ inclusion in our shop, Welcoming Schools introduced us to a lot more resources we didn't know about. We're starting to gather them under our one virtual and brick-and-mortar roof so that parents, teachers, and others working with children and youth can easily order these resources (without having to go to you-know-where....). These are the products we've gathered so far. BUT, the resources are even MORE useful if used in coordination with the Welcoming Schools program. So go to their web site and learn more!  And... the team at Welcoming Schools has a copy of our newly published Operation Marriage and we're hoping that it will soon be added to their list of recommended resources.
| 
