Beyond the Dialectics and Polemics: Canadian Catholic Schools Addressing LGBT Youth Issues

In 2012, Canadian media coverage on Bill 13—an Ontario legislative proposal to require all publicly funded schools to support Gay-Straight Alliances as a means of addressing issues concerning bullied lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students—instigated a divisive exchange among representatives of the Ontario Catholic school sector. Beyond these dialectics and polemics, a proactive mix of advocates from schools in the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB) of Ontario took steady steps to address the circumstances of their LGBT students. This study included semi-structured interviews with ten stakeholders from the WCDSB to determine if strategies and programs deemed successful for supporting LGBT students in public, secular schools in the United States could also be successful in supporting LGBT students in publicly funded Canadian Catholic schools. The study findings revealed that the strategies and programs could indeed be successful in supporting LGBT students in Canadian Catholic schools. We further found that the success of strategies and programs was influenced by factors such as acknowledging the priority of LGBT youth’s needs over ongoing disputes, realizing the significant influence of Catholic values, and recognizing the necessity for school boards to maintain legitimacy as publicly funded institutions.