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Yesterday, you needed to reassure your students and keep them safe. Today, you need to tell them the truth: Everything is not OK. We have work to do, and we can do it.

LGBT educators enjoy more openness and acceptance than ever before. But their gains have been fragile and uneven. And many still feel it’s safest to teach from the closet.

When the authors of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution wrote, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” they sparked a debate that continues

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” These few words, spoken casually by Sonia Sotomayor at the annual Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at UC-Berkeley in 2001, came back to haunt President Barack Obama’s nominee for the United States Supreme Court during the spring and summer of 2009. Hard to believe that this brief statement could cause such anguish, particularly among the conservative white senators who form part of the Senate Judiciary Committee, yet they led to days of arrogant grilling by the Senators and weeks of newspaper articles and commentary by television pundits speculating on what Sotomayor meant, whether it would hurt her confirmation, and what it would signal for the new court.

Teaching students about the role children have played in the march for civil rights—historically and today—is just one of many ways teachers can bring the Women’s March into the classroom.