By Liz Murray Garrigan

People from all over the predominantly Mormon state of Utah stormed the state Capitol in Salt Lake City earlier this year to protest legislation that would have banned non-academic high school clubs of any kind. The legislation, sponsored by conservative state Sen. Craig Taylor, was drafted in response to the formation of a club called the Gay Straight Alliance at a Salt Lake City high school. The Alliance’s mission is to bring gay teens and straight teens together, rather than to divide them.

The no-clubs legislation was passed in an amended form in April during a special legislative session. As it stands, the ruling gives local school boards the leeway to ban from public schools any clubs that deal with sexuality, including the Gay Straight Alliance.

“The potential for harm far outweighs the warm, fuzzy feeling [students] get by getting together,” Taylor said during a recent segment of Freedom Speaks, a television series produced in Nashville by the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center and aired on public television stations around the country. Taylor cites a series of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that permit the restriction of speech in public school settings if the speech involves hate or sexual orientation.

Many times, it is the limits—or the lack of them—in public schools that prompt some parents to send their children to private or parochial schools across the country. Liberal or conservative as the case may be, private schools allow parents the opportunity to expose their children—or not to expose them—to whatever experiences they approve.

At Nashville’s private, patrician Harpeth Hall School for girls, a recent controversy has raised thoughtful questions about what should and should not be permitted on that school’s campus. And it has raised questions as to just who—students or parents—should decide the parameters of on-campus discussions.

For now, the outcome has fallen on the side of the parents, the people who pay the bills. They argue that they are merely attempting to protect their children from exposure to something they deem inappropriate. Some of their children are not so easily convinced.

The children’s hour

First Amendment and anti-hate crusaders among the Harpeth Hall School student body are charging that the school’s administration caved in recently when confronted with opposition to plans for an assembly that would address discrimination against gay and lesbian teens.

“Basically, I’ve heard that board members threatened to leave and take their money and that some parents were even threatening to take their kids out of school,” says Tallu Schuyler, an 11th-grader who serves as president of Beyond Hate, the club that organized the assembly, which was scheduled for Nov. 14. The program, which was canceled by school administrators, was to feature a panel of gay and lesbian teenagers from a local support group, One-In-Teen. (The group’s name is a pun on statistics indicating that approximately one in 10 people is homosexual.)

Harpeth Hall’s head of school, Leah Rhys, paints a slightly different picture of the controversy. Rhys says it’s true that she was bombarded with calls from complaining parents, but she stops short of admitting that some parents threatened to withdraw funding or to take their daughters out of the private school, where annual tuition tops out at more than $8,000.

Some Harpeth Hall students and parents say the anti-assembly effort was spearheaded by John Mynatt, who works at the stockbrokerage firm Linsco Private Ledger and who has two daughters at Harpeth Hall. Students say that they suspect that Mynatt and other parents spread the news about the assembly via a “phone-tree” system which the school uses to communicate about snow days and school cancellations. Insiders at Harpeth Hall say Mynatt helped orchestrate the phone calls that overwhelmed the administration and led to the program’s cancellation.

Mynatt refused to discuss the issue, saying, “I am not of the liberal mind-set that your magazine is. I know your job is to stir controversy, and I’d just as soon you not stir it with me. I think it’s a private issue, and it’s a private school.”

Nevertheless, Mynatt has stirred up controversy in a local private school before. He enrolled his daughters at Harpeth Hall after removing them several years ago from University School of Nashville, a private school with a reputation for academic excellence and liberal-mindedness. Mynatt wrote a letter to USN officials and made the switch to Harpeth Hall over the University School allowing a gay and lesbian group on campus to talk to students.

There are plenty of Harpeth Hall parents who don’t necessarily share Mynatt’s alleged views, but they still defend the rights of parents to determine what goes on at the girls’ school. “Independent schools that are dealing with children not of majority age are contracting with parents about educating their children,” one parent says. “We’re the clients. It would be different if it were Vanderbilt and this was going on with the freshman class.”

Other parents say they were offended by the administration’s decision to cancel the assembly. “I was very surprised to see the administration react the way it did,” says a parent of a 10th-grader at Harpeth Hall. “It has been seen by the girls as a financial decision, which is really too bad.”

Girl talk

Members of the four-year-old Beyond Hate Club are puzzled. They say it’s ironic that a group that was organized to combat intolerance has itself become the subject of such heated debate, and as they see it, censorship. Beyond Hate members have planned and staged assemblies at Harpeth Hall for several years, successfully presenting speakers and panel discussions addressing volatile topics such as the Holocaust and AIDS.

Actually, it seems appropriate that there should be some discussion of lesbianism on the Harpeth Hall campus. The school’s predecessor, Ward-Belmont School for girls, which closed the same year Harpeth Hall was founded, was started by two women some historians speculate were lesbians. Ida E. Hood and Susan L. Heron are buried at Mt. Olivet Cemetery in a grave with a double marker. Documents and paperwork found in the Nashville Room of the public library paint a picture of two lifemates who very likely shared much more than a devoted “friendship.” (One oft-repeated anecdote tells of the two women daily pushing the sofa in front of the door when it came time for their afternoon nap. They lived in the house where Vanderbilt University chancellor Joe Wyatt lives now.)

In any case, Harpeth Hall administration officials defend themselves, saying they didn’t give in, but that they simply intervened when distortions about the planned assembly spread like wildfire to parents, many of whom created an informal but aggressive campaign to stop the program.

Some club members say they knew they were headed for trouble when the phone calls started coming in and when the school administration announced that attendance at the One-In-Teen assembly would be optional. After consulting with the executive board of trustees of the school, Rhys notified both students and parents that the assembly would be canceled altogether, to be replaced by a “town meeting” during which students could say whether they had favored or opposed plans for the One-in-Teen presentation.

“More than a couple kids were upset when [the assembly] was canceled,” Rhys says. But she also says that the controversy was only fueled by the fact that students and parents didn’t know exactly what the content of the assembly would be. Just five days before the assembly, she says, One-in-Teen’s participation in the program had not been confirmed.

“Because it was poor planning, frankly, information leaked out, and things got hopelessly distorted, both about the purpose of the assembly and the nature of the group,” Rhys says, adding that once the misinformation was circulating, “it was hopeless to try to clarify.”

Rules and regulations

Tallu Schuyler of Beyond Hate admits that, as little as a week before the scheduled assembly, One-in-Teen’s participation was not confirmed. Still, she says, One-in-Teen had been invited to come and was expected to be there. “The assembly was canceled before they knew [One-in-Teen] was not confirmed,” she insists.

Schuyler says the replacement assembly—the town meeting—was better than nothing, although some students were concerned about the limits that were set out for the discussion. Kristen Campbell, editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, Logos II, and a member of Beyond Hate, says that, because of the ground rules that were laid out, the town meeting was much more sterile and less informative than it might have been.

“There were certain things we weren’t allowed to say,” says Campbell, who wrote about the canceled assembly in a front-page story in Logos II. That story was decidedly tough on the Harpeth Hall administration.

Rhys confirms that students were asked to keep their comments brief and to focus on the question of whether they agreed or disagreed with cancellation of the assembly. “The topic was given boundaries,” she says, adding that if a student began to discuss homosexuality, “that would have been out of bounds.”

By the time the meeting was over, several students had spoken up in defense of the assembly, but no one had spoken in favor of the administration’s decision, Campbell says.

Still, she wrote in the school newspaper, the “open forum response...was not indicative of the actual attitude of the school, as a large number of the students still feel the assembly was inappropriate.”

Rhys says discussion of discrimination against gays and lesbians has a place at Harpeth Hall, but she says it should be addressed in the context of talking about other oppressed groups, such as people with obesity or speech impediments.

As for Beyond Hate, its members think such an approach would be a copout. They think homosexuality should be dealt with in its own context and in open terms. “We are definitely not done with this issue, especially because this is something that Harpeth Hall desperately needs to embrace,” Schuyler says.

Ultimately, Harpeth Hall’s students may have to accept the fact that, as students in private school, they’re not the dealmakers. Unfair though it may be, the money passes from the parents to the schools. And, at least in private school settings, so do the decisions.

Ultimately, Harpeth Hall’s students may have to accept the fact that, as students in private school, they’re not the dealmakers. Unfair though it may be, the money passes from the parents to the schools. And, at least in private school settings, so do the decisions.