Is there a relationship between sexual orientation and perceived school safety among teachers?

Abstract

A teacher’s perception of safety is a critical component of school safety. A substantial body of scholarship explores factors related to a teacher’s perception of school safety, underscoring individual, school, neighborhood, and state-level factors that may contribute to how safe teachers feel in school. However, empirical research examining how a teacher’s sexual orientation may relate to school safety perceptions is underdeveloped in the school safety literature. Filling this gap is important because the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community comprise 10% of the nation’s teachers, but there is only anecdotal evidence that LGB educators may not feel as safe in schools as their peers. This study examined the relationship between LGB status among teachers and how safe they feel in school, controlling for a range of individual, school, and neighborhood characteristics. For data collection, a survey was administered to public-school teachers in Oklahoma that yielded a sample of 1,605 teachers, including 113 LGB teachers. Results indicated that with controls for individual, school, and neighborhood level factors, LGB status does not have a statistically significant relationship with a teacher’s perceptions of physical and emotional safety or self-reported incidents of victimization. The results also indicated that LGB teachers who had disclosed their sexual orientation status reported statistically significant lower rates of teacher victimization. This study contributes to the literature on teachers and school safety by offering an analysis of LGB educators’ perceptions of school safety on three key measures. Findings also offer suggestive evidence that complex selection mechanisms may be underlying the patterns observed in this study.