High School Used $10K Grant To Hand Out ‘Chest Binders’ At Local Pride Parade, Stock Library With LGBTQ Books
A New Mexico high school used $10,000 in grant funds to purchase “chest binders” and pro-LGBTQ books for its library, emails show. Centennial High School received the grant from a pro-LGBT nonprofit, It Gets Better, to…
A New Mexico high school used $10,000 in grant funds to purchase “chest binders” and pro-LGBTQ books for its library, emails show.
Centennial High School received the grant from a pro-LGBT nonprofit, It Gets Better, to construct a “gender-inclusive closet” that would provide “supplies and clothes for trans and gender non-conforming students,” according to an announcement. Yet the school appears to have used the money for a different purpose, instead spending $8,370 on “chest binders” to hand out at a “Pride Day event,” communications between Las Cruces Public Schools’ (LCPS) legal support department and the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance, a civil liberty watchdog, reveal.
It Gets Better is “an organization with a mission to uplift, empower, and connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth around the globe.” In 2022, the organization awarded 50 grants in 40 states, with each school that applied receiving the full $10,000.
Ashley McClure, an independent storytelling assistant for the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), first learned of the $10,000 grant for the “gender-inclusive closet” after hearing about it from another IWF Storyteller. The IWF obtained documents through the New Mexico Freedoms Alliance, which were then shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation