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)