Exiting Official Made Anti-Bullying a Top Priority

By Nirvi Shah

Ed Week

When Kevin Jennings recalls the mother of Carl Walker-Hoover handing his 6th grade picture to first lady Michelle Obama at the White House anti-bullying conference earlier this year, he gets choked up.

Carl was 11 when he hanged himself in April 2009, an event his mother said was the result of bullying at school in Springfield, Mass.

Mr. Jennings, who survived his own share of personal and political attacks but went on to thrive in his efforts to create national awareness about bullying, is set to leave his post as assistant deputy secretary running the U.S. Department of Education’s office of safe and drug-free schools on Thursday after about two years.

“I’ve gotten to know so many of these parents,” Mr. Jennings, 48, said of the families of bullying victims. “I was really proud to play a part in galvanizing the administration to do something about it,” he said, although some supporters fear his departure could mean the attention on bullying could diminish.

He leaves the Education Department to become president and chief executive officer of Be the Change, a Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit that previously worked on campaigns devoted to volunteering. Mr. Jennings will work on the group’s new campaign about improving economic opportunities. The department said it is unknown when Mr. Jennings’ replacement will be appointed.

His new job is a departure from the work he has been devoted to for much of his career. Before being appointed assistant deputy secretary by Secretary Arne Duncan, Mr. Jennings founded and ran the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, which works on improving school climates. ("Bullying a Top Concern for New Safe-Schools Chief," July 15, 2009.)

After a lifetime working on one of his passions, Mr. Jennings said it is time to work on the other.

“I grew up gay and I grew up poor. I’ve had a chance to help young gay kids. I lived below the poverty line in trailer parks across the South. I had a chance to live the American dream,” said Mr. Jennings, the first in his family to go to college. “That dream seems to be disappearing for the next generation.”

Departure’s Timing

Mr. Jennings is leaving, long after the controversy surrounding his appointment subsided. Soon after he was appointed in 2009, a group of House Republicans wrote to President Barack Obama, asking for Mr. Jennings’ removal. The letter said Mr. Jennings “played an integral role in promoting homosexuality and pushing a pro-homosexual agenda in America’s schools—an agenda that runs counter to the values that many parents desire to instill in their children.”

The conservative Family Research Council created a website devoted to criticizing Mr. Jennings, in part because of advice he once gave a student more than 20 years earlier. Mr. Jennings said that when he was a high school teacher in 1988, a sophomore told him he had gone home with an older man he met in a bus station. Mr. Jennings said he told the boy, “I hope you knew to use a condom.” Mr. Jennings later said he regretted not informing the police or a doctor.

In a statement about Mr. Jennings’ departure, Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, revisited some of those early critiques.

“His inability to recognize appropriate boundaries restricting sexual relationship between adults and children rendered him unfit for any post in the Department of Education,” he said. “Mr. Jennings’ announcement that he is leaving the Department of Education means that our schoolchildren are safer. I only wish he had never received this appointment in the first place, and our schoolchildren should have never been put in jeopardy.”…

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