By empowering our students to lead and serve lead for change is changing lives, transforming communities and improving our world. Learn more, check out the research and access free leadership curriculum now at leadforchange.org. On behalf of the American Federation of Teachers, I'd like to welcome everyone to today's webinar on creating K12 schools that welcome all genders. My name is Andy Kratovil with share my lesson and today I will be your moderator. Before we begin, I'd like to thank today's virtual conference sponsor lead for Change, which is celebrating its 10th year. Need for change is a freedom meters of curriculum for grades six through 12 with a community service framework that is easily integrated into any class club percent setting. Need for change is the nation's fastest growing, privately funded student leadership program with more than 15,000 educators and nearly two million students. To your class, club or school or a chance to win up to $10,000 in the lead for Change Challenge. You can learn more about lead for change by clicking on their logo on the right side of your screen. We truly appreciate your support. Alright, now let's watch a short video on how our webinars work, and then we'll get into it. Hello everyone, welcome to our 2022 share my lesson virtual conference. My name is Kelly Booze, director of the American Federation of Teachers. Share my lesson before we begin. We'll go over a few housekeeping items. For those of you who have joined us many times before, you know that we make our webinars as engaging as we possibly can. So to get us started, please open up that group chat box and tell us where you are from and why you are joining us today and what interests you about this particular topic. In addition to the group chat, if you're joining us live, you will be able to provide some different reactions throughout the webinar today, so let us know what you're thinking and throughout the webinar, whatever reaction you want to give, share it with us and share it with your fellow participants. At the end of this webinar, we will be facilitating a question and answer session. Use that Q&A widget to submit any questions that you want us to ask the presenter. If you have any technical issues, please also use a Q&A widget and one of our share. My lesson team members is there and ready to respond to you. If you would like a copy of the slide deck or any of the related materials, you can find those in the resource widget. For those of you who want professional development credit, you will be able to download a PDF certificate at the conclusion of this webinar verifying your participation today, you do need to answer the poll questions that you will see throughout the webinar. To access that certificate now, let's turn it back over to your moderator who will put up a sample poll question for you to try. The poll question is located directly in the slides. You can answer your question and then hit submit. From all of us at share my lesson. Thank you for joining us today. Enjoy your webinar. Alright, everybody, before we get started I'm going to do this practice poll question for you. So summer is going to be here before we know it. I'm really excited because I'm from California. I love the sun. I love the water. So if you are giving the option of an all expenses trip, which one would you choose? Disney World Alaskan Cruise 6 minute trip to space. A sandy beach or a cabin in the woods, please make sure to submit your answer so you get a feel for her or pools work and then if you'd like to tell us why. It shows that answer in the chat box, I'll give you guys a few minutes to answer that before we get started, and then that will be the results and we'll go ahead. All right, we've got about 3/4 of us answering anyone else wanna put in their last answers before we get going? Alright, let's see what everyone said. OK, the winners are Alaskan Cruise Alaskan cruise. Sounds really cool to me. My preference, personally is a sandy beach, but all of these are really great awesome. So now it's my pleasure to introduce our presenter today, Michelle Hassle, with the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's welcoming schools. You can read more about Michelle on the bio on the right hand side of your screen. Thank you for joining us today and welcome. Hi everyone, my name is Michelle Hatchel and I use she her pronouns and I am delighted to be here with you today. I am beaming to you from Madison, WI and I would always, always pick a sandy beach. As far as the pole you just took. Going to talk about one of the major strands of our program today which is creating schools that welcome all genders. We have six different professional development trainings, which I'll speak about in a moment, and then I'll also show you where we have hundreds of resources available for free for schools on our website and many of them are also on share my lesson and we are delighted to be helping people get access to our resources through. Share my listen. As well, to get us started today, I wanted to show you a video that was developed by our program and as you watch the video I really want you to listen closely to what these children are saying about what they need from their educators. I love school because I get to give my friends. I'm excited about making friends. In the new class new teacher, how could you not be excited? When I first joined my school, I was worried that, like I might not have friends just because I'm part of LGBTQ community or they might like not want to be friends with me because I'm a boy who likes Eminem things. My classmates in kindergarten were saying stuff like boys can like pink. They, like blue, always, can't like princesses. They like dinosaurs or something so it didn't make me feel welcome so. I told the teacher she did not believe me when I have assignment. My teacher says tell your mom and dad sign this and makes me feel a little sad. They should just say tell your parents to sign this because not all families are the same. My teacher has read us books about like families like moms and moms, dads and dads. Just moms or just dads. It showed me that it's OK to be yourself and that it's OK to be different than other people in the world. One time I had a substitute PE teacher and he divided us into boys and girls and I didn't know which one to go into so. After that my PE teacher now doesn't divide us into boys and girls and now he divides us into colored T shirts. Now when I go to PE, I don't feel worried. A welcoming school to me means the safe space for all people for welcoming school to me means feeling like it's my home. To me means I'm safe and protected or welcoming school to me means everything. I would love folks to drop in the chat. What did you hear that stood out to you in that video when you listened to the students? One of the main things that you might have heard is you know Jonah, feeling that his family is not included the way educators talk about families. Yeah, being worried about going to class, how important it is to use inclusive language and we're going to talk about the the practice of sorting kids and how that can be done differently in really simple ways. Great. Great, I appreciate your comments, yes. So you know, as we go through this workshop today, I'm going to give you some highlights of activities that we do with schools and our professional development trainings to both help folks create gender expansive schools or I like to say gender creative schools, particularly at the younger ages. And then we'll also briefly talk about our our resources that we offer for schools on supporting transgender and nonbinary students. Because this is a two part process, you want to create a gender expansive gender inclusive school that helps all kids thrive and reach their full academic and social potential. And we also want to have direct supports for our transgender and nonbinary students in place so that when kids are in our schools, they just get to be kids and get to learning. Get to making friends. So we'll talk about some of that. But first, I just want to give you some broad highlights about our program. So we have we are a P K12 program and we have six different professional developments that we offer. We offer embracing all families that training. I like to call it the the song right? So LGBTQ plus families are one note in the song, but a lot of schools leave algc plus families out. We know it's our job as educators to create welcoming, affirming school climates for. All the kids that we serve, all the families we are working with and I would also include our educators as well. Our educators with marginalized identities so in embracing all families we really talk about diverse family structures and how to make processes in schools much more inclusive. A simple example would be having inclusive language on school forms such as parent or caregiver instead of. Mom or dad. We also have an LGBTQ plus inclusive schools training intersectionality, which is the foundation of all of the work that we do because we we really wanna think about students, whole selves and students who have multiple March lcisd identities. And then I already talked about gender inclusive schools and supporting trans and nonbinary students. Those are two paired trainings that go together. Two different trainings and once schools have worked through that content they really are in a position that policies and procedures in place and really in simple terms for educators people know what to do and how to support students. It gets everyone on board and then a big focus of our program as well is preventing bias based bullying and what makes us stand out from other programs is that we have a lot of. Activities and lessons that students can do so that they can practice allyship and Co. Conspirator ship and what what we are finding. We are a data driven program is that schools that have used our approach for two or more years are seeing a 50% reduction in bullying referrals. So we are increasing students capacity to know when they can handle the situation. We're also helping students understand when they need to get support from a caring adult. Our program works in all across the United States. We're currently working in 45 states. We've also done trainings in Canada and Mexico, as well as Taiwan. We have a team of highly skilled facilitators. All of our facilitators have been involved in. Education for decades and many of them are equity experts as well. And then we have impacted 10.5 million students since the beginning of this program. And so you know, we are continuing to grow, and while we are in 45 states, that doesn't mean there aren't a lot more schools that we would like to reach in each of those states as well. Because I do believe every school needs to be a welcoming school. And you know this should be happening in every single school. That serving students. So these are just some highlights from our evaluations. I just wanted to share a few of the comments from educators 1. Educator said I've been teaching for 26 years and I can honestly say that this was one of the best trainings I have ever attended. It was much needed. We also had. This has been the most interactive and best presented training I have attended in a while. The content was presented in such a way that challenged my thinking and also made me feel equipped to further dive into this work. Thank you. And this was one of the first trainings that I've ever had that had bipac presenters and non binary presenters. It was refreshing and necessary. So I want us to first of all ground ourselves in what is gender. So I would like you to drop in the chat. You know if someone asked you, let's say one of your students asked you what is gender, how would you respond? You can go ahead and type it in the chat. Yeah, so generally when we're Yep someone put a signed at birth. Gender is your internal sense of self with an exclamation point. What else do we have? How someone identifies? Yep, how you see yourself. Gender is how you identify. OK, what else? What's the common perception of gender? Like if we just looked at TV social media, what would we see? You know what would we say then? What is gender? Yeah, one way our society keeps people in boxes right? What are the boxes we call the boy girl boxes right? Or the binary you're going to hear this term a lot. You're also going to hear the term non binary, which means you know gender. Expansive gender. Creative beyond these stereotypes and boxes. That and one thing we're going to talk about today and we've really go in depth on this in our trainings is that we we replicate a lot of these systems. In our schools and with simple changes we can create really gender expansive schools because, you know one example I often give is, you know we're still seeing data by that by second grade. Girls have internalized the message that math or stem is for boys. We still see, you know, in the younger grades a lot of times kids, self separating into different activities. Because they're fed all these marketing messages about what's for boys or girls instead of what is for all kids. Thank you all for your great answers. So I want to show you before we do a couple activities together. This is a video from our partners at advocates for youth and they have wonderful sexual health resources. They've got K12 standards for health and Wellness and they have a lot of amazing videos on their amazed website that you can use with your students. So I'm gonna go ahead and play this video. All right, folks. Here we go, a romaine and kale salad with avocado, cucumber, shishito, Peppers and four kinds of cheese sprinkled in balsamic. Straight from Italy. Wow, in my day salads only had two ingredients. A rock hard wedge of iceberg lettuce and a stinky old dried up tomato. Sorry guys, I'm gonna have to eat fast. Alex is stopping by in a few minutes to work on a robotics project. Alex is that the girl with that weird dog or the boy with the hat with the wings that flap. No uncle Jay. This is Alex OK, I remember a very nice young come to think of it. Well is Alex a boy or a girl? Actually Alex doesn't define themselves as boy or girl. What else is there back in your day, most people understood the world in terms of just boys and girls. But now we know gender is more complex than that. Wait, aren't we just talking about whether you're born with a or a when you're born, your sex? Is assigned in a medical way, but the sex listed on your birth certificate may not necessarily match your gender identity. Gender identity is a person's inner experience of who they are in terms of gender, their deep, personal sense of being male, female, a blend of both or neither. And while many people have a gender identity that's the same as their assigned birth sex of female or male, that's not always the case because gender exists on a spectrum like transgender. Which means a person whose gender identity is not consistent with their assigned birth sex. Nonbinary, which means a person whose identity doesn't fall in the category of either male or female and genderqueer or genderfluid, which means a person who does not identify themselves as having a specific gender at all those gender identity have to do with being straight or gay. Actually, no gender identity has to do with the way you feel about yourself, while sexual orientation is based on the way you feel toward others, the people you may or may not be attracted to. You know, I really like Alex and I can tell they're a good friend to you, but I'm still pretty confused about all of this. That's OK, you don't have to fully understand someone to respect them. To start, try not to make any assumptions about a person's gender and use the name and pronouns that they ask you to. Above all, be a friend or ally for people of all gender identities. That's right, mom. Alex is here. Come on in hey everyone, oh hey Alex. Care for some salad? The Balsamics right from Italy, you know? Alright folks, here we go. A romaine and kale. Hi everyone, sorry I clicked the wrong button I believe so we're gonna talk about. Our early school memories and this is going to ground us in some of this work. So what I want you to do in a moment I'm going to share a padlet and I want you to go back in your mind. You can go to the grade level that you primarily work with, or you can go all the way back to your earliest memory. If you would like to do so and what I want you to do is think about practices in the school where you went that were really focused on the. Binary that boy girl concept that there are only you know two genders. So if you could. Think about that. Take a moment in your mind and then I'm going to switch to the padlet and I would like each of you to type in there that you know you're an example. And if you have a lot of examples, you can certainly add those as well. I'm going to share a couple with you. For example, I remember in elementary school if the class was getting in trouble, the punishment would be to sort us into boys and girls. That or to mix us together so we couldn't sit together. You know, just all kinds of things like that you heard in the video I showed at the beginning the anxiety it can cause for students if they are sorted into boy and girl lines for physical education. Or other subjects. So I want everyone to think of some examples and then I'm gonna switch to the padlet and we'll go ahead and enter our responses in there. Thank you Andy. Is giving great directions in the chat so you need to click on the link that goes to the padlet and then you'll be able to see peoples responses. And I'll go ahead and read some of the responses as they come in. Yeah, so we've got. Physical education teams boy and girl lines. Cowboys and Cowgirls school uniforms. What else do we see? I know we have a lot more folks on here, so I'm gonna give people time. Let's get a good list going here. The dreaded Sadie Hawkins dance, yes. And more uniforms. As for girls, B is for boys lunch room assignments, yes, career pathways. I am old enough to remember that I had to take a homec and I wasn't allowed to take shop and I desperately wanted to take shop. Yeah, and I want you to stay on this forum and keep reading other folks responses. 'cause in a second we're going to do a second part of this activity on the padlet. Yep, recess gendering of the activities that definitely can be part of this as well. Morning message starters. OK, while folks are reading through those, here's what I want you to think about now, because this is where. What's the expression where the rubber hits the road. I want you to go through this padlet and you can choose to give it a thumbs up or thumbs down depending on your mood. But what I want you to do is check the ones that you know are still happening in schools. So it's basically us. Kind of giving a pole in the padlet here. So for example, I see you know addressing the class as boys and girls, so I'm gonna click the thumbs up because I certainly know that still happening and in my work I get asked a lot to help with school uniforms and dress code. So I'm giving that one a thumbs up 'cause that is still happening in schools. So I'm going to give folks a few minutes to go in there and read through all of these and just give a mark on the ones that are that you know are still happening, not necessarily in your school, but just generally across the board. Yeah, I'm seeing restrooms are marked by a lot of folks is still, you know, being separated by gender? I'm seeing a lot of. Marks on mother daughter, father, daughter dance. We'll talk about that a little bit today. 'cause there are definitely different names. For example, I'm in Wisconsin, so you could certainly have a cheese curds with caregivers events you know. Instead of naming a certain family member, you know which pushes out other family members. Yep, shop class great. So I just want you to keep that in mind as we go on to the next few slides. I think the important things we're going to talk about next, and we're going to use a second padlet. To think about this is I want you to think about the ways that students are sorted and addressed in schools because. This is an easy place to start. A long while ago in my school what we did just to get this gender mindset change going is that we worked together as a whole staff to stop sorting students by gender and it took us a year to do this because there were a lot of layers to this. You know it was easier to do in the classroom, but then we might have guests, teachers or substitutes who did not know we were doing. So at a certain point we put a pop up in our sub request system. That said, we don't sort students by gender in this school, so you know these are simple practices, but sometimes they can take a little while to implement. So what I want you to think about our two things and we're going to use another pad lit in a second so you can add a couple of examples. We had a lot of fun with this in my school. Ways to sort students. I was an elementary art teacher for over 20 years, so. It was really fun to think of lots of ways to sort the kids, and I had them help me too. So you know, think about OK everybody who has a wiggly tooth can line up everybody who lost a tooth can line up. It's also a way to help students get to know each other and learn differences and similarities between each other. We had color groups, you know, red, yellow, green, blue. Yeah, kids chose favorite animals for their groups and then we would switch it up. So I just want you to think about this and then the other layer to this is how do you address students 'cause we don't wanna be saying girls and boys, ladies and gentlemen, so we're also gonna put some suggestions on the forum for that as well. I like to use friends with people but a lot of educators want to be more formal so you could say scholars, leaders, future presidents. So I'm gonna get you started. I think I've given you enough examples. And then you can again click on the link here and that's going to take you to the padlet and then we will look at this together. And thank you so much Andy, you're such a great help. Andy put the link in there. Yep, team everyone, friends, students, scholars y'all is a good one. Living in the Midwest, a lot of people use guys. That's a tough habit to break. Folks or folks. Cool cats and kittens. I like that one. So this is an activity you can do in your building, right? You could sit down at a staff meeting. It doesn't take much time and give everybody some post-its, and you could really think about this as a school community and then implement this. And you know these layers of change really create transformation. Overtime. They really do, especially if you're having conversations with everyone about it. Yeah, I've seen some fun ones on here. You know, I also used to think of it as aspirational too, so I'd say like future Supreme Court justices line up at the door. I, one of my colleagues uses the Learning lab. My brilliant ones is lovely. Yeah, it's a you know, really. The way we address our our students can really be uplifting for them in these small moments. You know, because in schools we do have a bajillion transitions, and if we can make those transitions affirming and fun. That can really, you know, it just improved school climate. Great thank you all so much, these are wonderful. So what I would like to do now, as I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of free resources available on our website and also in share my lesson. So I'm going to go through now and give some highlights of resources that we have and you know, please take some time to check out our website. So I highlighted some of our lessons here, so we have an extensive suite of lessons on our website. We are adding more secondary lessons, but we have over 50 PK 8 lessons, so the theme of this overview is gender, so I wanted to highlight some of our lessons. We have many lessons on names and pronouns and how to incorporate those into your classroom. We even recommend you know when you're getting to know families at the beginning of the year. Make it standard practice of what you do to talk with families about the language they just used to describe their families. For example, my daughter has two moms she calls me Mama Shell and her other mom, Mama Liz. So we always appreciated it. If teachers checked in with us about that and asked us how they could talk about our family in the classroom. And we always brought in books for the school to use as well another layer to this is asking people what pronouns they use if they use them. Some people don't. We also have folks using multiple pronouns. You know, if you know someone who uses sheet and they pronouns, you're gonna want to check in and see you know when they might want you to use they pronouns when they might want you to use she pronouns. There's a lot of complexity to pronouns and my advice. Is to center folks and just respectfully ask pronouns, or just another way of being addressed like our names and it. And we already knows educators. It's really important to pronounce our students names correctly, so you know, it's also equally important to address our students with the pronouns they want to be called. We also have a lesson called the name jar that I love for the beginning of the school year. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this book. But it's a lovely story about a classroom learning to pronounce their friends name correctly and respect her culture. So another lesson we have that I recommend, because this I'd like to remind people this work can be fun, right? So we have a couple lessons that kids really enjoy and that is our toy store lesson and our media literacy lesson. Part of the work here in reducing gender stereotyping in schools is helping students have digital and media literacy, so these lessons really help. One of the lessons every student thinks of a favorite toy in my school. All of our students were multilingual, so you know this lesson is also written in a way that helps emerging by literate students. So each student draws a toy that they care about, and then they put all the toys together and then you break your kiddos into groups and you have them design a toy store where they sort everyone. Favorite toys, but they cannot sort the toys by gender. This alone gets so many important conversations started with your students and it's really a wonderful activity for your K through three students and then for your three through five students. We also have a lesson called media sleuths examining gender roles in advertising so kids can. You know, look at print media. They can go online, you can give them some directed sites and really just help them examine gender marketing. That's happening and start conversations about how they feel about that and then part of the lesson is writing a persuasive letter and my students wrote persuasive letters to Lego and they got so excited about it. They even encouraged Lego they. He sent it through LEGO's website, Lego. Added the women Scientist series shortly after we did this project and my students were definitely part of the change and that was very empowering for these 4th and 5th graders to have a strong feeling to be able to write about it, you know. And that's a requirement for 4th grade literacy content. We are a literature based program so those are just a couple highlights of lessons of. There are many more on our website. Another really important concept is gender expression. That is our hair, our clothing, our mannerisms. Everyone has a gender expression and one of the most important things to start doing in schools is disrupting assumptions people make about other folks based on how they look. So you know, just not making assumptions about if someone identifies as male or female, or you know something altogether different and you know we have a lot of lessons to really help. Start working on this at the younger ages, and so one of them is Jacob's new dress. You may be familiar with that book. That's a great read aloud. I really like that book too because it shows teacher intervention. Another great book is Calvin that just came out that also has lovely school examples about supporting a trend student who Leon is a mermaid is a beautiful book about gender expression, so that's an important concept and when we come in to do professional development with schools, we really go more in depth about these concepts and help people not conflate sexual orientation and gender. Another resource that is much love from our program is that we have many many book lists. We just added secondary book lists. Those are on our website. We have a middle grade book list and we have several. Strands of book list for elementary schools. So that's available on our website, and I definitely, highly recommend you check that out. Many of the books also have lessons, and the ones that do do have a hyperlink to the lesson as well. I also just on books I want to go back a minute. I'm there is so much pushback right now about LGBTQA plus lit in schools. I've been doing some research on this and according to the American Library Association in September there was a 60% increase in book censorship. Book banning compared to the year before. That is the low estimate because a lot of people don't know if you're facing pushback. An inclusive literature you can report that to the American Library Association. They are tracking the data across the US and they're keeping track, so that's a really helpful thing to do. If you're facing pushback. They also have a lot of resources to help you protect access to high quality literature. Soum we have a checklist that I'm going to share with you and it's embedded in a padlet. I have one for elementary schools and one for secondary schools. So what I wanna do to kind of? Wrap things up together for us today is I want to share. These checklists and I want you to read through the checklists and. Commit to one thing that you were going to do after this workshop. Today it could be one thing you know coming up soon or you might be thinking ahead for next school year and thinking you know I'm going to write a grant. I want to get some more LGBTQA plus books in my school. I want to get some more books on diverse families. I want to get more intersectional books that you know really mirror my students identities and also give them windows into. People who are different from them, so I'll share that padlet and then you'll be able to. Click the handouts whatever is best for your grade level and for your learning, and then we'll share some of these together in the padlet. Thank you again, Andy. Yeah, so the underneath it says there's a secondary checklist and then the elementary or PK checklist is well is called gender and children a place to begin. Both of these are available on our website as well. You could also put it in the poll here if that's easier for you, but you will want to open the padlet so that you can get access to the checklist. So I'm seeing some we've got soon next month in this year. A lot of folks are going to work on not separating by gender, adding more high quality literature, excellent. Sharing resources out with your staff on our website. Under training there is a spot where you can request information about our professional development trainings. We would love to come work with your school. We do offer both in person and virtual trainings depending on well, they're always both an option but you know due to COVID, sometimes we're not able to schedule in person. You know if we're having an uptick, but otherwise we can. Come in person as well. Yeah, adding more variety to the library is on here. Sharing information with the Superintendent and school board. Wonderful, yeah, these are some great outcomes. I also wanted to just talk a little bit more about supporting trans and nonbinary students, and what welcoming schools can offer on our website. We have a lot of lesson plans and resources, but we also can help schools and school districts put policies and procedures. In place we're at the point with this that school districts don't have to reinvent the wheel. A lot of other districts already have great policies that have been used for years and are working smoothly. So, and we can also come in and just, you know, prevent do professional development. We really aim to keep our trainings about 60 to 70% activities. We don't want it to be sit and get, so you know, that's another thing people really enjoy. About our trainings. So, and I'm I do want to address what's going on in the the chat here because I think this is really important. Language does matter and language is changing a lot, and so there's a conversation going on here about using the word tribe and just I'm going to flip to a gender example. So two spirit is a term that people use, but you only use that term. If you are part of a native or indigenous community, it's not a term for other folks to use, so we you know what I recommend. We're all learning is, you know. Follow first sources on social on Instagram on Twitter, you know, follow organizations so you can read and watch and learn. And you know when someone corrects you. Just say thanks and you know start implementing what they said. Because if marginalized people tell you some things, a problem, believe them. You know really don't engage in debate. You know it's that's not helpful. So yeah, I appreciate folks chiming in here, you know. And again, language is evolving. We're definitely learning this from our students right now. We. We know from the Trevor Project Youth Mental Health Survey that youth are identifying with over 100 different combinations of gender identities and sexual orientations, so this isn't new. You know gender diversity. Sexual diversity has always been as long as there have been humans, but Gen Z is definitely coming up with new language and ways to talk about how they identify which. As a teacher, I find to be very exciting and you know, it's an opportunity to learn from my students. So I would love to just take questions from you all, and if I don't know I will do my best to find out. So I'm looking at the chat here. Yeah, someone commenting people have always been. Diverse but also oppressed and marginalized? Yes, so PBS has an amazing website where they researched both in the past and present gender diversity in cultures throughout the world. So for those of you who have high school students, that would be a great resource to use and really talk about this and unpack it. And yeah, I you know myself in my classroom a lot of times. I really push myself to embrace the questions from my students and say, yeah, let's find out about that. Let's do some research. OK, so we have a question here. What about when their parents who are not on board? How do you handle that? That's a great question. We do talk about this a lot in our professional development trainings. We know that youth who have at least one affirming adults have fare far better. So it is always a goal to create support around students. Most people come out to friends or a caring adult first, not their families. That doesn't mean they won't come out to their families, but I just like to let people know that. So what I recommend is centering the student, checking in with them, and you know just making sure they are OK and that you have their consent with whatever connections you're making. Schools can be a pathway to acceptance. They can connect families with local parent groups. There are many parents support groups for parents of queer youth. On Facebook, they're also national organizations like Gender Spectrum. Who have groups for both families and children so that you know that's absolutely something that schools can do on our website. We have a gender support checklist and that really raises some important questions. If you're supporting a transitioning student. OK, I'm looking at the questions here. Yeah, how do you deal with colleagues who might not be on board? So this is where it's important to have policies and procedures in your district. We wanna see enumerated policies that specifically mention sexual orientation, gender identity and expression so. Sorry I got distracted 'cause it's a slide switch for no reason. I'll just leave it so we want to see an enumerated policy again that specifically names sexual orientation, gender identity and expression. Why does this matter? Because we know if marginalized identities are named in enumerated policies, that more is likely to be done if something happens and students are more likely to report to a caring adult. So that's one thing you can do, and the other thing I would say is. It is our professional obligation to create affirming schools for all of the students and families that we serve. It's our job so you know, home and school can be different. Some of us may need to, you know, do some shifting. We're at work because we need to do what's best for our students. And you know, we can all agree that none of us want our students to be bullied for who they are. How they're dressing, what they like to play with, and that's what we're talking about. So it's really important to show up for our students and create an affirming environment. OK, and I'm looking through the comments here. I'm seeing some love for libraries that's great. They deserve all the love. Let's see if I missed a question. Yeah, another resource I'd like to mention is first book. They have a lot of free books available, many of them are on our list for schools that are title one schools. So it's called first book. You may want to check out their website, 'cause you might be able to. You know, get some books for your school at at little to no cost. Great, well I'm not seeing any more questions here so I'm gonna turn it over to Andy and Andy is gonna show you a couple slides. I will also drop my email in the chat. Please reach out to me if you have any questions. It's really is the joy of my life helping people with this. And you know I have a lot of resources and so I'm more than happy to send you resources or connect you up with what you need. Particularly, I just wanna send extra love to those of you who are in some of the states facing huge pushback like Florida and Texas. There are still things you can do so you know don't don't be afraid to reach out for help. We were here for you so yeah, and just thank you so much. Educators deserve $1,000,000 for the last two years all that they've brokered. And I'm just so grateful. That y'all are here showing up for LGBTQ plus youth. On top of the 10,000 other things that you are doing, it just helps me sleep better at night. So thank you so much. I appreciate y'all greatly. Thank you so much Michelle, for this excellent presentation with extremely extremely important content. Now everybody before I play my video, I just wanna remind you if you haven't rated and reviewed the session yet, please do so. It's really important to make sure that we can continue to offer high quality, engaging webinars like when we just had. I want to also thank you again Michelle. It was excellent and for those of you that were confused about the poll questions, I'm going to put the second one back up right now, remember? It is a prompt. So make sure to type your answer into the prompt. I'm going to have that up for about 30 seconds and then we're going to play the closing video with ways that you can get the most out of today's webinar. I know we have another web and are starting in about 5 minutes, so I will get that going in just a moment. You can also know if you've done everything required. You can download that PDF certificate at the bottom of your screen and move along to the next webinar or enjoy the rest of your day. Uhm, let's see and I'm going to go ahead and play that closing video right now. Thank you. Hi everyone, Kelly booze rejoining you again. I hope you enjoyed today's webinar as much as I did. I want to go over a couple reminders and I have one big favor to ask of you. First, you should now be able to download that PDF certificate for your participation. Today you can access that PDF certificate using one of the widgets, the one with the checkbox. From here you should be able to open up that PDF certificate and download it. The certificate will be saved to your name for up to a year. 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