By Amy Moran, Ph. D. (she/her)
Kate Okeson, my co-writer for the Rainbow Connection column, has been appointed the executive director of the new Advisory Commission on Advancing LGBTQIA+ Youth Equity and Inclusion in Schools with the New Jersey Department of Education. This groundbreaking commission is the first of its kind in the nation and will provide a model for other states that endeavor to follow New Jersey’s lead—with Okeson at the helm—in helping schools be authentically safer spaces for all students.
Okeson’s appointment to the commission is no surprise to those who know her and the work she’s done over the last several decades. Art educator and local union president of the Rumson-Fair Haven Schools Employees Association from 2008-24, Okeson is a co-founder of Make It Better for Youth (MIB4Y): the Monmouth County Consortium for LGBTQ Youth which, among other things, partnered with Garden State Equality to advance the cause of LGBT-inclusive curricula in New Jersey public schools.
Birth of an organizer
Raised in rural Warren County, Okeson saw her father, David, creatively and collaboratively organize area businesspeople through their local Kiwanis chapter to raise money to help families in their community who needed financial support. They held an annual flower sale and wrote a song that heralded people and places in their quaint country town. Kiwanis members sang the song outside the grocery store to encourage shoppers to buy their potted beauties.
With her father’s example of grassroots organizing, Okeson started organizing in her first year at Rutgers’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she helped the second-oldest college campus queer group grow from five members to 70.
Between 1993 and 1997, Okeson learned about agitation propaganda art and read about organizing strategies and affinity group cohesion in groups like ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). She and other queer organizers drew on media available at the time, including Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (1981), Harvey Fierstein’s film “Torch Song Trilogy” (1988), and Jennie Livingston’s documentary “Paris is Burning” (1990). Okeson and other club leaders traveled 72 miles round trip to New York City to rent a VHS copy of “Paris is Burning” in the West Village to bring it to her New Brunswick campus for group viewing before making the trip again to return it in person, as was done at the time.
By the mid-1990s, Okeson developed a clear understanding of how embedded and dangerous anti-LGBTQIA+ societal standards were, and that they communicated one message loud and clear: queer futures don’t exist.
In media representation, LGBTQIA+ people were simply eliminated through murder, suicide or psychiatric institutionalization. Okeson knew that rural queer youth struggled to envision a life for themselves that didn’t include public shunning, ostracization from their families, and employment and housing insecurity because of their status as LGBTQIA+ people in a culture that normalized antagonism toward them.
Okeson looked to other civil rights causes and marveled at others’ courage and agency. She read about the “504” protests and disability justice workers who put their bodies on the line to encode societal change with universal design to better access public education, now considered normal institutional practice. “504” refers to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which mandates the integration of people with disabilities into mainstream institutions.
She was inspired by Black, Brown, and Indigenous queer and transgender poets who wrote about lived layers of injustice and learned how limiting the white perspective is for comprehensively explaining and advocating for justice in its many places of need.
During the time when Okeson was organizing with peers in dorm rooms, she came to understand the importance of centering “we” above “me,” knowing the justice work they were designing was to have ripple effects reaching far and wide.
Okeson started teaching as an out lesbian in 1997, eventually transferring in 2002 to Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School, where she centered her practice on “the discipline of creative and critical thought as a means to ask beautiful questions which lead to growth and action.”
Understanding how a rural upbringing disallowed “outness” about one’s LGBTQIA+ identity was a major motivator for action. Okeson synthesized what she learned about minority stress models, chronic exposure to social trauma, school dropouts and reduced academic outcomes of queer kids to co-found Make It Better For Youth (MIB4Y): the Monmouth County Consortium for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning Youth, saying, “We know too much to not act.” Through MIB4Y, Okeson organized concerned and determined educators, community leaders, arts and cultural organizations, businesses and individuals to pool resources of many kinds to affirm queer young people through education and outreach.
In November 2017, Okeson was honored with Monmouth County Junior League’s “Women Making a Difference” award, accompanied by a small monetary sum.
Knowing that LGBT-inclusive curriculum initiatives were working their way slowly through the legislative process in Trenton, Okeson called friend and longtime activist Carol Watchler for advice on how she might use the award money to help advance the cause. Watchler had seen the passage of harassment, intimidation, and bullying laws and statewide guidelines on transgender students under the governorship of Chris Christie. She was up to date on much of the literature about LGBT-inclusive education practices.
At the time, Learning for Justice and GLSEN provided some of the only models of LGBT-inclusive curricula in circulation, other than college-level work and “Making the Fair Act Fair,” the 63-page academic critique of California’s 2011 groundbreaking social studies curriculum. Concurrently, inclusive curriculum legislation that had advanced slowly under Christie was picking up momentum after Gov. Phil Murphy’s 2016 win, and Okeson used her award money to organize a one-day summit.
Imaginative mobilizing
In 2018, Okeson sent an email to people she thought would be interested in developing inclusive curricula and put out an open call on social media inviting educators to meet at Red Bank Regional High School on March 23 of that year. Almost 30 people joined the one-day summit, which was designed to begin exploring ways to address the potential of a complex, unfunded, LGBTQ+ curriculum mandate, and how to do so with integrity-rich academic content for students in schools.
They anticipated pushback from uninformed stakeholders. At the time, this felt like a “third rail” issue. Much of the queer youth advocacy happening in schools was done by vulnerable queer and queer-allied teachers who were earnestly working to prevent young people from having as difficult a time as they’d had in school.
The morning session was designed to explore questions followed by an afternoon of conversation about what best practices could look like with LGBTQ-inclusive curricula:
How can discussions in schools expand beyond a “heroes and holidays” approach and move toward complex pedagogies that explore systems of oppression and their impact on people?
How can queer-inclusive curricular content steer clear of the risk of respectability politics, where real voices and experiences are excluded in favor of queer people who are considered mainstream and “palatable” by straight, cisgender people?
How can the boundaries of “acceptable” examples in history be expanded to reflect the authentic queer American experience, better enabling New Jersey students to envision an authentic future for themselves?
In the second half of the day, guiding questions and breakout discussion groups yielded several understandings. First, representatives from various stakeholder positions in schools needed to be engaged, including administrators, counselors, teachers and curriculum writers. Second, an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum mandate might pass, but it would be unfunded. Getting the word out to districts would require a plan so that teachers knew they had the green light to proceed with inclusive lessons. It would also require exploring what skills and content knowledge teachers would need to implement the mandate with fidelity.
Participants agreed that resources needed to be developed, whether or not the law passed in Trenton, because this work mattered. Providing educational insight as classroom teachers—both in service and retired—Okeson and Watchler lobbied for the bill early that summer. The bill was passed by both houses of the state Legislature that December.
Meeting in the middle
It is Okeson’s practice to work organically with teachers at the grassroots level around the pragmatics of bringing LGBTQ-inclusive curricula into schools. Core to this practice is her understanding that top-down mandates (i.e., legislation) must be fed from the bottom up (i.e., grassroots organizing). This allows both the Legislature and the grassroots to co-create best outcomes for New Jersey students.
In January of 2019, Gov. Murphy signed A-1335, the LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum bill, into law. Behind the scenes, Okeson created an application process for stakeholders to join a donation-funded, three-day retreat to deepen the visioning work, now that New Jersey public schools were legally mandated to use LGBTQ-inclusive instruction in middle and high school classes in all content areas. The mandate, after all, came with no clear directives for how each district should manifest it.
By February, participants were selected, and the retreat was held that March at Murray Grove in Barnegat.
Using what Okeson referred to as “old school organizing” strategies, the retreat was designed to be nonhierarchical and generative, where the nearly 30 retreat participants’ ideas about LGBTQ-inclusive curricula were welcome, and the leading question was simply, “How can we make this happen?”
Everyone brought what they could, ranging from food to a boom box, from the latest research paper to a particular inroad for school counselors, from grant writing access to grassroots donation possibilities, and more.
These collaborative creatives hailed from many areas that are integral to youth advocacy: English language arts and humanities, school administration, school counseling, PFLAG, archivism, anti-bullying curriculum development and more.
Participants came away with clear insights:
- Find practical fixes. Participants who analyzed attributes of their own districts noticed trends and identified gaps, making recommendations around what would be most useful and realistic for teachers.
- Include administrators. Administrative issues were identified, including aspects of building functioning, school culture and the importance of “queering” the lesson plan formats as an expectation by leadership.
- Recruit allies. The people who came with prior interest—those who identified as queer, had connection with members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and other connections—needed a broader group to work with if the outcomes intended by the newly minted mandate would realize their intended benefits for New Jersey students.
Of special importance for Okeson and her allies was connecting the experiences of marginalization rather than framing racial equity and queer equity, for example, as separate justice causes. They acknowledged and explored the parallels of systems of oppression, rather than isolating efforts around social justice for different groups.
In April, Okeson met with Ashley Chiappano-Riker, the Safe Schools & Community Education Manager for Garden State Equality who is also the parent of a transgender daughter, and Dr. Lori Burns, an out lesbian administrator, to distill essential takeaways and action items. From this conversation, Chiappano-Riker and Burns started Educators for Equality and, with Okeson, developed the data-driven LGBTQ Inclusive Curriculum Pilot Program for New Jersey’s Public Schools.
The pilot was the first of its kind in the nation and worked in partnership with researchers from area colleges and universities. Seventy-two districts applied to participate, and 12 were selected. Curriculum writers also applied and were selected, adhering to the beliefs that LGBTQ+ inclusive education is an obligation, must be intersectional, and that we cannot wait for textbooks to be revised or for districts to provide professional development.
In January 2020, the pilot was launched, just as Okeson received NJEA’s prestigious Equality Champion Award. Despite the pandemic’s abrupt interruption of the in-district work and data collection process, 10 schools completed the pilot, and Burns created an executive summary of the pilot’s findings. It can be read, along with a repository of the program’s LGBTQ-inclusive lesson options online at Teach.LGBT.
That fall, curriculum writers and instructional coaches became professional developers who gave virtual trainings in schools beyond the original pilot schools. This work was born of Okeson’s three-day retreat initiative and continues to be available at Teach.LGBT.
Continuing to move forward
In the spring of 2021, Okeson and I discussed how so many school-based training needs still centered on entry-level understandings and that many group workshops had attendees with wide ranges of readiness. This requires unique on-the-spot differentiation in content delivery.
Some people were still curious about what LGBTQIA+ stood for and what those words meant, while others were ready to learn how to incorporate lessons into their eleventh-grade math class or fifth-grade English class in ways that affirm LGBTQIA+ students.
We’d noticed that districts across the state were differently activated around implementation of this now two-year-old law. We wanted to provide public school teachers across the state with discussion points about LGBTQIA+ issues in schools, regardless of whether their individual districts had made moves to incorporate LGBTQ-inclusive practices. With the understanding that nearly every NJEA member—essentially, nearly every educator in the state—receives the NJEA Review magazine every month, the “Rainbow Connection” column was born. Starting in September of 2021, Okeson and I co-authored 10 articles each year across a range of topics relating to queer issues in schools.
This forward motion—started years ago by people who Okeson considers mentors, supportive organizations invested stakeholders, and Okeson herself and her collaborators—continues to generate benefits in myriad education spaces.
This forward motion has also been supported in New Jersey public schools by:
- The law against harassment, intimidation, and bullying in schools.
- Statewide guidelines for supporting transgender students in schools.
- Adoption of social/emotional learning competencies.
- Updated health and physical education standards.
- The LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum mandate.
NJEA’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Committee launched its first annual conference, the NJEA Carol Watchler LGBTQIA+ Advocacy Conference in 2023 and will have its third annual convening on May 9 and 10, 2025. It is open to all NJEA members.
When advocating for and affirming vulnerable queer youth in schools was once a risky choice for adults in schools who were often alone in that work and unclear about their own civil rights, some facing backlash at the hands of administrators and community members, supporting LGBTQIA+ students (and teachers!) in schools is increasingly understood to be a concern for all of us.
Okeson receives national recognition
In July of 2024, as a result of NJEA’s nomination, Okeson was awarded the National Education Association’s Virginia Uribe Memorial Award for Creative Leadership in Human Rights. In her acceptance speech, Okeson honored mentor collaborators, acknowledging that “their actions to demonstrate their values, one of which is showing how we can speak, write, represent and live OUT loud so that our LGBTQAI+ students know there is a future for them full of possibility.”
She also thanked NJEA leadership “for connecting representation, practice and promise.” In reflecting on her recent decade of advocacy work, she came to these conclusions:
We know so much now about LGBTQAI+ outcomes that we are compelled to act, and often those actions are happening in environments, both political and social, that are hostile to these efforts, and it is those who lift up their LGBTQAI+ students through the choices in school and the classroom by giving visibility to others in these hostile environments, and those that navigate and utilize their own queer and trans visibility in a system still making strides to accept and affirm us…
State advisory commission formed
The New Jersey Department of Education’s new Advisory Commission on Advancing LGBTQIA+ Youth Equity and Inclusion in Schools also formed as a result of this forward motion, and we know Okeson’s activism and advocacy for students and educators in New Jersey will be only magnified in her new executive directorship.
This year’s publicly held Commission meetings will be at 10 a.m. on Dec. 2, Feb. 24, and May 5 at 100 River View Plaza in the 1st Floor Conference Room (CR1A) in Trenton. You can email Okeson at kokeson@doe.nj.gov or YouthEquity@doe.nj.gov for more information about the commission.
Okeson will be missed beyond words in the Rainbow Connection column, but please join me and all of NJEA in congratulating her and thanking her for all she’s done and continues to do for LGBTQIA+ students and their advocates.
Amy Moran, Ph.D. is an out queer educator, leader and activist working to make education affirming and inclusive for all of their students and colleagues. Moran has taught middle school for 29 years and was a high school GSA adviser for 16 years. She writes a monthly column, Rainbow Connection, for the NJEA Review. She can be reached at rainbowconnectionNJEA@gmail.com.
Teach.LGBT
Garden State Equality and Make It Better for Youth collaborated to create the website, Teach.LGBT. The website is a repository of LGBTQ-inclusive lesson plans. Special sections provide resources for administrators and teachers.
You’ll also discover an executive summary, authored by Dr. Lori Burns, of the findings of the LGBTQ Inclusive Curriculum Pilot Program for New Jersey’s Public Schools that was launched in 2020.