Northview’s GSA
Northview’s Gender-Sexuality Alliance strives to create an inclusive school environmentDisha Kumar, Staff Writer
GSA’s leadership, including senior Suraj Singareddy and sophomores Rachel Everett and Maansi Manoj, strive to make Northview a better place.
Photo by Jennifer Xia, Editor-in-Chief
Peer-to-peer connection can often be hard to achieve from behind a screen. With multiple extracurricular activities coming to a halt, many students are missing out on opportunities to interact and bond with their peers. One club in particular, however, bridges this divide between students: Northview’s Gender-Sexuality Alliance (GSA).
“We try to make Northview a safer space for queer students.”
“I think it’s really helped people just find that support network that they might be missing elsewhere,” Suraj Singareddy, Northview GSA’s president, said.
The club itself is evolving to be more inclusive of Northview’s diverse student body. Recently, the club shifted its name from Gay-Straight Alliance to Gender-Sexuality Alliance. By doing this, the club has been able to promote awareness of all genders and sexualities. GSA is also striving to become a more prominent club at Northview.
Senior Suraj Singareddy sits on the steps of a piece of playground equipment, which colors bring out the ones on the small paper flag he waves so proudly as a representation of his identity.
Photo by Jennifer Xia, Editor-in-Chief
“We’re just trying to become a larger part of the Northview community because in the past, we’ve kind of been low on everyone’s priority list,” Singareddy said. “We’re really trying to change up GSA to make it more involved in the school and to make its members more involved with the club itself.”
Each year, GSA has attended the Atlanta Pride Parade; although the pandemic will prevent the club from attending the parade this year, the club has a plethora of activities planned to adjust to these unprecedented times.
“We are definitely doing a lot more volunteering. We did phone banking back in June,” Singareddy said. “We are planning to organize a workshop for teachers so that they can learn how to better advocate for their queer students in a virtual space.”
Other events that GSA has in stock for this year include a clothing drive and a fundraiser for Snap Co, an Atlanta-based initiative aiming to support transgender and queer women. GSA’s newly motivated leadership team is responsible for a lot of these plans coming to fruition. Maansi Manoj, the club’s secretary, is passionate about connecting issues facing the LGBTQIA+ community to broader societal issues.
“I’m looking forward to some of the topics and discussions we have going on later in the year like the one we have about the effect of imperialism on gender identity and sexual orientation,” Manoj said. “We have things like Medicaid expansion, how that affects healthcare, and how that ties into the amount of options that are currently open for the LGBTQIA+ community because that’s currently limited with our current legislation.”
Although Manoj is only a sophomore, she is already a fierce campaigner for inclusivity.
Photo by Jennifer Xia, Editor-in-Chief
While it is fierce in campaigning, one of the most notable characteristics about GSA, however , is its warm, welcoming atmosphere.
“What I especially like is the cohort of people we’ve got,” Manoj said. “I’ve really known these people for a couple weeks, but I already feel like I’ve known them for years.”
Whether it is through funny group chat discussions or educational seminars, GSA constantly endeavors to make Northview a more welcoming place. Despite all of these efforts towards a more equal and just society, there still remains an inherent prejudice against members of the LGBTQIA+ community among the student body.
“We aspire to create a climate and culture and atmosphere where all of our students feel loved and supported and cared for and valued,” Brian Downey, Northview’s principal, said. “But I don’t know if I can say that is true for every kid.”
Georgia law also poses many obstacles for these students. If a student wants to go by a different name or gender than what is already in the system, the student would need to file lots of documentation. This is often a problem for students with parents who do not know about the student’s new identity, placing even more stress on the student. To combat this issue, GSA hopes to change the naming system at Northview to make it easier for queer students to freely identify with whatever name or gender they choose.
“It saddens me to say it out loud, but if you interview a kid who says, ‘I did not feel safe. I did not feel support. I did not feel accepted.’, then we have more work to do,” Downey said.
Current measures that Northview has in place to support LGBTQIA+ students include a declaration of values that each student should abide by. Teachers also have stickers on their doors to indicate that their classrooms are safe spaces. However, Singareddy feels that Northview could be doing a lot more to support queer students. To increase the amount of visible support for these students, the club hopes to implement a schoolwide Pride Parade and spirit week where people dress up to show that they are allies to the queer community. Unfortunately, there is still a long road ahead when it comes to making each and every student at Northview feel safe and accepted.
