Record number of students enrolled in HRC’s anti-bullying program this year
The Human Rights Campaign’s Welcoming Schools program reached a record 750,000 students in fiscal year 2024 — supporting communities that are contending with the dramatic rise, in recent years, of anti-LGBTQ harassment and reported hate crimes in schools.
Data on the expanded reach of HRC’s pre-K-12 anti-bullying program, now in its 16th year, was included in the group’s fourth annual Welcoming Schools report, released on Tuesday. “Welcoming Schools has continued to serve as a beacon, providing accessible training, resources, and actionable policies and practices at a time when proposals for anti-LGBTQ+ legislation specifically targeting our youth is at a devastatingly high level,” the group’s president, Kelley Robinson, said in the report’s introduction.
A third of the more than 550 anti-LGBTQ bills that were introduced across the U.S. last year have targeted LGBTQ inclusion in classrooms, disproportionately impacting transgender and gender-expansive youth, HRC noted in a press release announcement.
The “unsurprising result” of these legislative attacks, the organization wrote, has been a documented rise in bullying and harassment encountered by queer youth in educational settings.
