Student, target of anti-gay harassment in KS school, wins $440K settlement

A small-town teenager who was bullied for years by classmates because they believed he was gay was awarded $440,000 in a settlement, his lawyer said.

The settlement Thursday ended a longrunning battle between the Tonganoxie School District and 18-year-old Dylan Theno, who sued in May 2004 claiming he was harassed with homophobic slurs from seventh grade until he quit school his junior year.

Under the terms, the school district and its insurance company will pay Theno $440,000, said his attorney, Arthur Benson.

"I expect this case will have profound effects nationwide in dealing with schoolyard bullying and harassment," Benson said. "Insurance companies will have a very powerful economic incentive to see that districts' anti-harassment policies are aggressive and effective."

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More: http://www.sovo.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=4207

...and, if administrators won't stop the perpetrators, then the district is negligent.

bullying is rampant in the schools.

The teen in the case specifically denied that he was gay. His suit was about being called gay by bullies and the school's administration not correcting the situtation.

A more detailed article on the case can be found here:

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/13477592.htm

Upon reading more closely the article linked in my OP, there was never a mention of Theno being gay. The article only stated that other students teased him because they believed he was gay. I updated the title of my post to more accurately reflect that.

Thank you for the correction. :)

If falsely being called 'gay' is "bad" enough to be worth $440,000...isn't that a problem?

To use a bad example, if I teased you for having some random physical deformity, say a "third nipple" (and it was really a mole, what have you), I doubt it would be worth $440k. However, if by some miracle of nature, you really did have a third nipple, and I was teasing you so much as to make it unbearable, then it may be worth something. This case seems to be the former, which may imply some homophobia on the part of the student and the judge/jury (obviously the bullies are too, but that's not my point).

In other words, in a perfect world, being falsely called 'gay' should not be perceived as a bad thing by the student in question. In a perfect world.

Or maybe I'm reading way too much into this. Who knows.

... and I do wonder what kind of a settlement the student would have received if he had been gay.

But I have to hope that the award was more to punish the school district for not taking corrective action against the bullying, regardless of his sexual orientation.

(Of course the case is from Kansas, proud home of the pro-life, anti-evolution, anti-gay majority, so it's quite possible that the settlement did reflect a certain amount of "oh that poor straight boy accused of being 'that way'!" sort of belief.)