University Prep has built all-gender bathrooms, handed out pronoun pins, and tried to make itself a safer and more comforting community for non-binary students and faculty — all within the last three years.. 

Theater Manager Paul Fleming has been working at Uprep for 41 years and has seen a lot of change to make the school more inclusive for non-binary students.

“It wasn’t even discussed in 1981. When I started here, there was no discussion of that. There wasn’t even a discussion of sexuality. I was the first teacher on the campus to come out as gay, and that was in the nineties, early nineties,” Fleming said. 

Within the UPrep community, Fleming has noticed a shift in acceptance of non-binary individuals.

“Within the last five years I’ve seen a real openness start to occur. I’ve seen students be able to be comfortable with who they are.” Fleming said.

Many plays and musicals have male or female leads, potentially making the theater a less-inclusive space for non-binary individuals

“If they need change, I’m willing to work with them and make that adjustment. This is an educational theater, this isn’t a professional theater. In educational theater we have the latitude to make those discoveries” Fleming said.

UPrep freshman Rory Cox-Hultquist identifies as non-binary. Cox-Hultquist appreciated the efforts teachers made to make non-binary studetns feel included.

“A lot of my teachers have sent out surveys where they’ve asked for your school name, preferred name and your pronouns. Which was really nice,” Cox-Hultquist said.

A school name is a person’s legal name, it might not be the name they prefer to go by. 

Before attending Uprep, Rory attended The Evergreen School in Shoreline. At Evergreen and many schools across the nation, bathrooms are often a struggle for non-binary students.

“We had like maybe one or two (all) gendered bathrooms.” Cox-Hultquist said.

Cox-Hultquist has trouble walking long distances and has to use a cane. With only one main gender neutral bathroom on the UPrep campus, they find themselves missing a lot of class.

“It’s sometimes hard to not miss a ton of class and also get to the bathroom in time.” Cox-Hultquist said.

Social and Emotional Learning Coordinator Emily Schorr Lesnick wrote a play called How We Glow. The whole play is interviews with LGBTQ youth and is about their experiences.

“I think a lot of times we talk about LGBTQ young people, and we don’t listen to them. And so this was an opportunity to say, here’s people’s actual voices or actual stories,” Schorr Lesnick said.

Schorr Lesnick is on the Educator Advisory Committee for GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network). GLSEN is an organization that focuses on LGBTQ students in K-12 schools around the country. 

“There’s someone who’s an English teacher at a school in Oklahoma, and somebody who’s a school principal in California,” Schorr Lesnick said. “Public school, private school, really a mix it’s an opportunity to learn more about what GLSEN is doing”