Chicago's
Proposed LGBT High School Shelved

Plans for a high school for LGBT students in Chicago have been shelved. Educators behind the School for Social Justice Pride Campus, which was to be voted on by the board of education today, asked to have the proposal yanked from the agenda late Tuesday night, the Chicago Tribune reports.

The team developing the project, which first surfaced in news accounts earlier this fall, made the decision after being criticized by Chicago mayor Richard Daley and local activists, who said the plan amounted to segregation. The Tribune reports that some ministers complained too.

In response, advocates modified the proposal to target any student who faced harassment in school, but that opened up a new line of criticism that the original idea was being diluted, the Tribune reports.

Given the disagreements, the team decided to take another stab at the project. "There are some members of the design team who felt it was watered down too much and there was not enough consensus ... to move forward as it stood," schools spokesman Michael Vaughn told the Tribune.

The proposal will now go before the board of education next year, according to the paper. (The Advocate)