Magic City Acceptance Academy graduation 2022

Read reporter Savannah Tryens-Fernandes’ first story about the school’s first year here. Read more about how the Ed Lab reported this story here.

Almost three years ago Michael Wilson sat in brown leather armchairs at the Magic City Acceptance Center writing a proposal for a school that would become the South’s first LGBTQ-affirming public charter school.

He knew how badly it was needed. Youth would come to the Acceptance Center - an inclusive space for LGBTQ young people to access resources and support - and tell the staff they had UTIs because they didn’t feel they could use the bathroom at schools or had been beaten up by classmates.

Wilson wanted a school for these kids and other Alabama students who had been bullied and marginalized. His proposal promised an environment where trauma-informed practices, social-emotional learning and restorative justice principles were integral.

On Friday, in the same room where Wilson wrote his proposal -- the room where LGBTQ students shared how unsafe they felt in schools -- the Magic City Acceptance Academy, where Wilson was the founding principal, and now will become the school’s superintendent, graduated its inaugural class.

Wilson held back tears while giving his speech to the 12 graduates and their families. He spoke of how far they’d come, how much he treasured the community they built, and how grateful he was for this class of seniors who set the school’s traditions and expectations.

School administrators feared they wouldn’t even have a senior class. They knew the decision to transfer high schools in your last year is difficult, and they thought students would choose familiarity over the unknown of Magic City.

But when the school’s lottery opened for its first year in the Fall of 2021, educators received a dozen applications, with some students driving as far as an hour to school every day to be there.

Wilson gestured to the close-knit group sitting in the front row wearing purple caps and gowns.

“I love you,” he told them. “Thank you for sharing your senior year with me. I am honored.”

Tyler, 17, had already been to five schools in Alabama and several in Oklahoma for the two years he lived there from ages six to eight.

He liked Alabama’s woods and wildlife – spending as much time in nature as he could. He also liked the community of the few small towns he lived in, though he never felt part of them.

Tyler is transgender, which can be dangerous in this state that provides few protections for the group. Lawmakers this year have passed laws criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors, requiring educators to inform parents if their children are questioning their gender-identity, prohibiting students from using school bathrooms that align with their identity and barring the instruction of sexual orientation and gender in K-5 classrooms.

Alabama’s hate crime law does not include sexual orientation or gender identity as a protected group.

Passing for a boy was a matter of survival for Tyler and became a consuming goal.

Beginning at Brookwood Middle School in Tuscaloosa County, he did everything socially to look, talk and act like a boy. He learned as much about sports as he could and began talking in a lower voice, always careful not to slip into a more feminine tone.

But his transition was met with cruelty from both his peers and his teachers.

“They would never leave me alone. They would constantly deadname me and I got told that people could convert me,” he said. “I couldn’t walk into the women’s bathroom because I would get screamed at and I couldn’t walk into the men’s bathroom because I would get jumped.”

He says he tried to be a people pleaser to get other students to accept him – always friendly and obliging.

But the furthest he got was being called “the cool dyke.” An improvement from the other names, he said, but he knew it wasn’t acceptance.

His mental health and his grades deteriorated in his junior year.

“He’d just be going away into his room, hiding and withdrawn,” his dad, Neil Childress, said. “He was fighting an uphill battle the whole time at Brookwood. There was conflict with the teachers…and people were not understanding. So he just wasn’t involved in school whatsoever.”

Tyler’s experience is not unique among other gay, lesbian and transgender children in Alabama. According to a 2019 Alabama School Climate Survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national advocacy organization, nearly 80% of LGBTQ students in public and private schools in the state said they’d faced at least one form of discrimination during the school year.

During Tyler’s sophomore year, Nigel Shelby, a Black, openly gay freshman at Huntsville High School, died by suicide.

A federal lawsuit filed by Shelby’s parents against the Huntsville City Board of Education and Jo Stafford, the lead administrator for the freshman class, claimed their son never felt safe at Huntsville High, and that educators ignored his complaints.

According to the Trevor Project, the South is home to most of the country’s LGBTQ young people. But because of the stigma and lack of access to affirming spaces in the region, LGBTQ youth here are more likely to have attempted suicide than anywhere else in the US.

“LGBTQ-affirming schools are one key protective factor in addressing this risk,” said Myeshia Price, senior research scientist for The Trevor Project. “Our research has found that LGBTQ youth in the South with at least one in-person LGBTQ-affirming space, such as a school, had more than 40% lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year.”

The Shelbys’ lawsuit said the harassment of their son and its consequences were “predictable” given, they alleged, inadequate policies and training to support and protect LGBTQ students.

The Alabama state Department of Education does not have any policies or supports in place to specifically protect LGBTQ students, officials told AL.com. It also does not have professional development trainings for teachers and staff that focus on how to support this population.

State department officials told AL.com this spring that they did not consider adding additional anti-bullying training or policies after Nigel Shelby’s death.

“In recent times, politically it has been tough for different groups…And there are so many groups that are experiencing barriers and obstacles and challenges that we can’t focus on one particular group,” said Terry Roller, assistant state superintendent. “We focus on trying to save and touch as many lives of all children that we can.”

While school districts can choose to implement policies on a local level, only 3% of LGBTQ students in the state reported being in a school with a comprehensive bullying policy and only 4% of students said they were in a school with supportive trans or non-binary student policies, according to the GLSEN report.

Community organizations like the Magic City Acceptance Center offer educator trainings to help teachers and administrators gain a basic understanding of gender expression and gender identity, but only four schools have taken the training in the last five years, according to Amanda Keller, executive director of the Acceptance Center.

“Most schools and administrations do not want to have this conversation. They either feel very uncomfortable having it or insist that they don’t even have LGBTQ students. There’s a complete rejection of this information,” Keller said.

Only in April 2021 did the state remove language from the sexual education standard that said homosexuality “is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public” and that “homosexual conduct is a criminal offense under the laws of the state.”

The state department of education says students who are bullied can fill out reports with their school, which are investigated and given a due process review.

But many of the seniors who eventually came to Magic City Acceptance Academy said those policies failed them throughout their high school experience.

Their classmates made hate pages on Facebook targeting them, telling them to kill themselves or photoshopping them into humiliating and sometimes graphic situations. Administrators said they couldn’t do anything about bullying that happens on social media, according to students.

Tyler says he had to take a pair of scissors with him when went to the bathroom as protection. He still remembers the substitute teacher who once dragged him out of the bathroom by the collar, he says, telling him he wasn’t allowed in there.

But when a family friend told him about the Magic City Acceptance Academy during a softball game in the spring of his junior year, he wasn’t sure it’d be the right place for him.

“I was taught to blend in, not to label myself. So I was actually kind of worried about going to the school, because that would indeed be labeling myself that I am weird and out of the ordinary. The fact that I’m having to go to the ‘acceptance school’ means I’m not accepted,” he said.

This label was something state charter commissioners also debated.

“They couldn’t get past those five letters,” Wilson said, of the multiple hearings and rejections from officials. “They said if we were going to be LGBTQ-affirming, then we needed to be private.”

State commissioners heavily debated both the apparent need for the school and whether a publicly-funded school made sense for a group of minority students.

One commissioner, Marla Green, who voted no, reasoned that the school’s focus on LGBTQ students represented segregation.

“We’re a public charter school commission, we’re supposed to be a melting pot. You can choose to be segregated, but that means private,” she said during one commission meeting.

While the fear of different types of student segregation has been a core tension in the charter school debate, experts say charter schools are meant to serve as “laboratories for experiment” and provide solutions that public schools can incorporate so eventually there isn’t a need for a charter alternative.

According to Erica Frankenberg, education professor and director of the Center for Education and Civil Rights at Pennsylvania State University, in the short term, providing affirming schools benefits families who leave their traditional schools due to discrimination or marginalization.

“The political climate for LGBTQ kids in the south is really fairly hostile and there have been a lot of studies showing how health and mental health in these populations are being affected,” Frankenberg said. “The impact in the short term for providing affirming spaces is a really important one.”

“The goal of charter schools was to provide flexibility and innovation so that traditional public schools would learn from them so down the road, there isn’t a need for separate schools and students can be affirmed in their own space,” she added.

Preston Green, professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut, said many families don’t have the luxury of waiting for local public schools to confront discrimination.

Like Frankenberg, he said the need for specialized charter schools like Magic City Acceptance Academy should be determined by circumstances - like if students experience bullying and harassment in schools - with the potential risk being public schools feeling they’ve been “let off the hook.”

“The concern that I have is the temptation to just say that we’ve done enough, and we don’t have to worry about students in the traditional public schools, because if they don’t like it, they have another school they can go to,” he said.

Officials at the state department of education said they’d be willing to learn from Magic City’s best practices of student support and prevention services and have visited the school on several occasions to ensure they meet compliance standards.

“My staff have said that when they visited Magic City Acceptance Academy, what they’ve taken from that is that students there are truly being able to explore their own individual learning in a safe and supportive environment,” said Sean Stevens, who leads curriculum and instruction efforts at the ALSDE.

Tyler applied for the school’s lottery and when he received his acceptance in the mail, he saw it as a sign to enroll. Plus, he liked the idea of smaller class sizes and more individualized attention to help him get his grades up.

On the first day of school – and Tyler’s first day of his senior year of high school – he joined 12 other seniors - Loki, Lyn, Clover, Soup, Gwen, Sydney, Emily, Matt, Landon, Cedric and Tulley - as part of the inaugural class at Magic City.

Some students and parents drove up in tears because they were so relieved to be there, said Karen Musgrove, the CEO of Birmingham Aids Outreach – a nonprofit that operates both the school and the Magic City Acceptance Academy. They told her they couldn’t believe it was actually happening, and how they cried on their last day at their old school, too, because they’d never have to go back.

The students entered a school that was designed to be different from a traditional academic building.

After students talked about their fear of being pushed into lockers and the sensory impacts of loud bells, architects worked with educators to design a physical space that was more open and welcoming. The school doesn’t have lockers and Mr. Hugh plays the xylophone over the intercom in lieu of a bell. It has single occupancy, gender neutral bathrooms and sensory rooms where students can take short breaks.

The building is open and bright, with white and purple walls and windows that face the outside and hallways so that light streams all the way through. Inside classrooms teachers hung Pride flags and transgender flags next to signs that read “Everyone is Welcome Here” and “Mathematics May not Teach us How to Add Love or Subtract Hate but it Gives us Hope that Every Problem has a Solution.”

The seniors clicked quickly – “like dropping a magnet in a bottle of pins,” said Lyn.

Tyler still had people-pleasing tendencies, keeping mustard packets in his backpack for students experiencing period cramps. He promises it’s a quick cure.

But at this school, the other students call him “big brother” and ask for his help in math or art. He’s even signed up to be a peer helper and sometimes helps groom and train Wilson’s Vizslas, which are brought in as emotional support dogs for the students. The newest puppy is named Magic.

“Tyler’s got straight A’s across the board where at Brookwood he’d have maybe one A and Cs and Ds,” said his dad, Neil. “At Magic City, he’s involved in everything and it’s keeping him positive and going towards the right direction.”

At graduation, Tyler put his purple gown over his restaurant uniform, where he had just finished working a shift with his dad.

He sat in the front row and watched each speaker come up. His family and partner, a junior he met at the school, sat a few rows behind.

And just like that! Short and sweet! pic.twitter.com/us3abK5tsz

Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr gave the commencement speech with his mom, a retired Birmingham City Schools principal, there to accompany him.

“When I walked into this room, I felt love, I felt respect…I felt all the things we so need in our community,” Carr said.

He was followed by Denise Bishop, a supporter of the school, who presented a scholarship of $1,000 in her grandson’s honor, the Connor Large Memorial Scholarship.

Her grandson was “the most amazing, smart, empathetic, and good-looking gay kid around,” she said.

But he, “like so many of you,” experienced bullying and harassment in his public schools “simply because he was different.” He died from complications from addiction in March 2019.

“This school would have been the answer to our prayers,” she said.

A few parents around the room nodded, grateful they had the chance to see their children walk across the stage.

“I couldn’t even think about the future before. We had to take it day by day because I wasn’t sure she’d be here in two days time,” said Sara O’Neal, a parent of a senior. “Now … she’s applying to the University of Alabama at Huntsville.”

Her daughter also helped secure a Starbucks union that very morning, just the latest piece of activism she worked on during her time at the school, including on a John Oliver segment advocating for gender-affirming care.

“She can finally be herself at Magic City. It’s like a weight has been lifted,” said O’Neal.

The students crossed their stage as their families cheered them on.

“I’m proud to be your Aunt, Gwen!” screamed out one attendee.

Tyler’s dad and stepmother watched grinning. Tears welled up in his stepmom’s eyes.

“We’re just so proud,” she said as Tyler made his way over to them.

He’s not quite ready to leave Magic City and is starting a paid internship as a pet groomer next week.

Wilson told him he was welcome back to the school at any time to help the younger students, something Tyler is really excited about.

“We’re always gonna come back to this school,” Tyler said. “I genuinely think that this is a community. Even if us as friends don’t stay. This will be our community and safe place.”

Savannah Tryens-Fernandes is a member of The Alabama Education Lab team at AL.com. She is supported through a partnership with Report for America. Learn more here and contribute to support the team here.

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