On Feb. 16, Clifford Nooney was honored with a Friends of Education Award, presented by the Capital Area School Development Association. Nooney manages the physical plant for the Guilderland schools. He wasn’t honored, though, for overseeing 52 staff members, caring for 33 acres and over a million square feet of building space.

No, he was honored for an act of human compassion. In December, he had hung the sign for the school district’s first all-gender bathroom.

“Students celebrated and even wept with joy at the sight of this beacon of acceptance, respect, and belonging,” wrote the district in announcing the award.

A bathroom as a beacon?

Yes, indeed. In our times, it has become a symbol of accepting people for who they are, for who they choose to be.

The Enterprise covered the unfolding story at Guilderland  — starting when two courageous transgender students, Julia Crooks and Ryka Sweeny, first addressed the school board in January 2016. Both of them are members of the school’s Alliance, a club that offers them a place they don’t feel judged and aren’t called names. Nooney went to Alliance meetings to understand the students’ concerns and goals.

The stories we told of the transgender students ran along with the progress the state of New York was making. The day after Julia and Ryka spoke to the school board in Guilderland, statewide regulations  were coincidentally announced by the governor to protect transgender New Yorkers. The regulations, effective on Jan. 20, 2016 affirm that transgender people are protected under New York’s Human Rights Law. That law — the first of its kind in the nation, enacted in 1945 — affords every citizen “an equal opportunity to enjoy a full and productive life.”

In June, we profiled Riley Gohlke-Schermer a Guilderland transgender student who uses the pronoun “they” and describes themselves as “gender fluid.” Riley, who said their lesbian parents had always accepted and supported them, told of the terrible time Riley had in middle school. “People in science class yelled, ‘You’re gay.’ They threw pens at me. They threw garbage in my locker. They threw my stuff on the floor. They wrote about me on the bathroom wall...Nobody speaks up. Everybody’s a bystander.”

The year before, in July 2015, the New York State Education Department released guidelines for districts across the state to follow on obligations to protect students’ privacy; the use of student names and pronouns; access to bathrooms and locker rooms; and when and how to involve family members in talking about a student’s gender identity.

In August 2016, we looked at the report on how schools across the state were doing in following the Dignity for All Students Act — there were some problems in schools accurately self-reporting instances of harassment, bullying, and discrimination.

Although we prodded the districts we cover to not just follow the letter of the law but to follow its spirit, understanding and accepting those who might be different than ourselves, we were pleased and proud, too, to report their  progress.

Berne-Knox-Westerlo adopted a new policy and identified a “unisex” bathroom — “It allows everybody, no matter how they identify, to make the choice for themselves,” said Superintendent Timothy Mundell. He also said, “It’s important to listen to kids and work with them as much as we can, teaching tolerance for all perspectives and accommodating the people we serve — our students and their families.”

Voorheesville, too, had adopted new policy, labeled single-room bathrooms with symbols for male and female, and put up privacy screens in changing areas. “You don’t have to be transgender to want privacy,” said Superintendent Brian Hunt.

Leaders in the schools we cover are taking good care of our students.

So why were we so disheartened when, on Feb. 22, President Donald Trump rescinded protections for transgender students that, among other things, had let them use bathrooms corresponding to their gender identity? We should not have been surprised that Trump made good on yet another of his campaign promises to social conservatives.

We were surprised, and pleased, that his newly appointed secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, raised some objections before agreeing to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s move to roll back the previous administration’s directives before two pending court cases could uphold the protections. DeVos issued a strong call for the moral obligation for every school in America to protect its students against discrimination and harassment.

But, without the force of federal government withholding aid, some states and school districts will continue to deny these civil rights. The federal directive from the Obama administration, which was very similar to what New York State already had in place, cited Title IX of the Education Amendments, which took effect in 1972, as requiring schools “to provide a safe and nondiscriminatory environment for all students, including transgender students.”

Our state’s commissioner of education, Mary Ellen Elia, was quick to respond to the Trump directive, stating, “Our most sacred duty as parents, educators and leaders of state agencies is to protect all of the children in our care. Transgender youth are valued members of our schools and communities across New York State, yet statistics show that more than half of them will attempt suicide at least once by their 20th birthday.”

That’s a sobering statistic. And there are more.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students victimized because of their gender expression were more than three times as likely to have missed school than their less victimized counterparts, according to the 2013 National School Climate Survey. They also had lower grades than students who reported being harassed less often; they were twice as likely not to plan education after high school; and they had higher levels of depression and lower levels of self-esteem.

The sort of derision that transgender students described on our pages — and, mind you, these were in districts with policies in place to protect them — should give us all pause. And should make us redouble our efforts to accept them for who they are and treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve.

The great danger in having a president and a federal directive that chips away at the civil rights of any of us — even in states like New York with its own protections — is it weakens all of us. Under the current administration and the rhetoric of hate it has ushered in, hate crimes have spiked, particularly against minority groups and immigrants, against anyone who isn’t white and Christian.

We urge our schools to stand proud and stand strong.

Ryka Sweeney told us of helping Cliff Nooney put the sign on the transgender bathroom at Guilderland High School, “I am thrilled about it. I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited in my life than the day we hung up that sign.”

Symbols matter.  And that sign on a school bathroom door is as much a beacon as the torch carried by our Statue of Liberty — the statue that cries with silent lips, “Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

We would like to tell Ryka and Julia and Riley — and any transgender person reading this: Don’t let a federal directive let you think less of yourself. You have worked hard, harder than most of us, to discover and assert your identity. We are grateful to have you in our midst. We stand as one with you.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer