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Sonia is a quiet girl with a shy smile who never raises her hand in my class. Recently, she told me that she is bisexual. Sonia shared this during a conflict resolution meeting conducted for her and another girl in the class, Katie. She had a crush on Katie and had been pursuing her through frequent text messages. Sonia had persisted even though Katie had made it clear she only wanted to be friends. At the end of our meeting, Sonia agreed to stop texting Katie. By the end of the day they appeared to be friends again.

This week reminded us of two pioneering women in aviation. The nation mourned the death of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. At the same time, many of us celebrated the 115th birthday of Amelia Earhart.

My eighth-grade girls squealed at the shirtless male movie star photos in a magazine. “Oh my gosh! Check out the abs on this one!” “Yeah,” responded another. “And look at that picture of Taylor Lautner. His face isn’t very good looking, but who cares. Look at those muscles!” This is a typical exchange in my classroom during lunch or before morning meeting. As a teenager, I remember flipping through fashion and celebrity magazines, looking at female models with long legs, luminous skin and perfect hair. They represented what I was supposed to be. Knowing how far away I was from looking like them definitely made me feel ugly. But the magazines were also telling me what kind of guy I should find attractive. Apparently, not much has changed in teenage popular culture.

A school district in the midwestern town of Erie, Ill. found Todd Parr’s award-winning children’s book objectionable because it included references to gay and lesbian families. The school board gave in to pressure from a small group of outspoken parents and decided to remove The Family Book, written and illustrated by Parr, from their elementary school’s social and emotional development curriculum. According to school district Superintendent Brad Cox, the concerned parents took issue with the fact that "the book references families with two mommies or two daddies."

We each have a part to play, a role uniquely ours each day. I’d raised my hand often enough and spoke about equity and LGBT rights during my years in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District to convince myself I was accomplishing the role I’d chosen when I decided to teach.

This just in: Men make up a small fraction of early childhood and elementary school teachers. And for children younger than 6, having a male teacher is a rarity. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 2.3 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers are men.

As the school year draws to a close, the SPLC salutes just a few of the students this year who fought the good fight, challenging homophobia and gender discrimination in their schools. If it’s true that young people are our future, the future is looking pretty diverse, free and fabulous. We hope you are as inspired to read about them as we at the SPLC have been to work with them.