A new gay-friendly high school has been proposed for Chicago and, if accepted, will join the likes of New York’s Harvey Milk High School as a safe place for LGBTQA (lesbian, gay, transgendered, questioning and allied) students.

“This is not simply a gay high school,” said William Greaves, Director and Community Liaison of the city of Chicago on Human Relations’ Advisory Council on LGBT Issues. “It is a place where LGBTQA students can feel safe.”

The proposal was submitted by the Greater Lawndale Little Village School for Social Justice, a school created from a 19-day hunger strike put on by students, teachers and parents in the area when their cries for a school were pushed aside by the Chicago Public School board because of financial reasons.

The proposed Social Justice High School Pride Campus—as it would be called—has been in development since spring and will be a college preparatory, modeled after Jones College Preparatory School, 606 S. State St., in the South Loop.

“We want the students to go onto post-secondary education with help from their peers,” Greaves said.

“The location has not been chosen yet, but I would love to have it in the South or West Loop area of the city. The centralized location of the city would give easy access from all over [Chicagoland],” Greaves said. “We aren’t looking for a new building; what will probably happen is we’ll move into an older building and take it from there.”

If approved, the Social Justice High School Pride Campus will become a citywide public high school open to students beginning September 2010.

A CPS community hearing will take place on Sept. 18 at the Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted St., to inform the public of the proposal.

From there, it will be discussed at the CPS annual press conference on Oct. 1.

“Anywhere between 35-50 schools apply each year to the CPS Office of New Schools,” said Malon Edwards for CPS.

All this is due to Mayor Richard M. Daley’s launch of the Renaissance 2010 program, which stated in June 2004 that 100 new schools were to be created by 2010, using a competitive, community-based selection process.

Among the designers for the proposed Pride Campus are teachers and administrators from the School of Social Justice at Little Village, a professor from the University of Illinois Chicago, the educational director from About Face Theatre, the director and staff of the Chicago Public Schools Office of Student Development and the Chicago liaison to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities.

Drop-out rates among LGBTQA youth are high, as they have a higher potential to struggle with harassment, depression, poor academic achievement and suicide, according to the Chicago Public High Schools 2003 Youth Risk Survey Results. The survey also stated that 52 percent of students identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual are said to report suffering from depression compared to 31 percent of their non-gay peers.

“We are not looking to isolate these children, but to ally them with people from different sexual orientations,” Greaves said “Therapy and help will be available along with skills to help them succeed in their post-secondary endeavors.”