The halls and classrooms of Bellerose Composite High School were a lot quieter yesterday. It wasn’t due to an outbreak of laryngitis or a mime festival. No, the reason was a serious social issue.
The school’s Gay-Straight Alliance club participated in a movement called the Day of Silence. The event, held every April, is a student-led day of action that has concerned and conscientious students take a vow of silence to draw attention to the psychological abuse of name-calling, bullying and harassment experienced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered community and its straight allies.
Counsellor Krysta Wosnack co-founded the club along with music teacher Karen Labahn and they are still involved with it in its third year. It is still the only club of its kind among both school districts in St. Albert and only a few exist in Edmonton. The Bellerose Gay-Straight Alliance even won a Pride Award for its activities.
Wosnack said that even though Bellerose has a great group of students and has always enjoyed a high level of tolerance, the Day of Silence is still important to show solidarity and send a message to the broader community. The fight for human rights is an ongoing process.
“It’s just a day where people can support or actively participate in being silent to honour lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered individuals that feel like they can’t speak for themselves or be themselves.”
“Since the GSA started, it’s been really good education-wise for our student population in that they’ve gotten a better understanding of how to be more tolerant. I don’t think it’s not that they weren’t tolerant at all. It’s just that they understand it better. This is something that touches a lot of people.”
When the club first started, several of its members were openly out and showed affection with their partners on school grounds. The club has dwindled in size recently but they still have heart.
This is the 15th year that the day has been held since its inception at the University of Virginia.
Students there came up with the idea as a submission for a class assignment on non-violent protests. It has since been called the largest one-day student-led grassroots action on LGBT rights in American history, now with more than 8,000 schools of all grade levels participating.
For Bellerose’s part, participating students wore rainbow-coloured ribbons. If anyone tried to talk to them, they held up another ribbon that indicated what they were doing and why.
To learn more about the movement, please visit www.dayofsilence.org.
