Nearly three years after the school board axed extracurricular clubs in order to get rid of a gay student support group, the target of the ban is thriving.
And East High School, where the Gay-Straight Alliance unsettled state legislators and grabbed national headlines, is hurting."It's been a disaster," said Scott Nelson, a social studies and history teacher. "There's more to education than just the curriculum. . . . There's a certain social element."
The controversy began in 1995 with a student's request to form a support group for gay teens, the Gay-Straight Alliance. The deeply conservative state Legislature quickly lined up against the idea.
On the other side were civil libertarians and hundreds of high school students -- only a few of them gay -- who rallied and marched on the Statehouse to save their extracurricular clubs. But their efforts proved fruitless.
Federal law prohibits public schools from discriminating against nonacademic clubs that are based on unpopular ideas, like homosexuality. So rather than stomach the Gay-Straight Alliance at East High, the Salt Lake School Board in February 1996 banished all clubs not linked to the curriculum in this conservative city's four high schools.
Sacrificed were dozens of clubs, including those focused on racial awareness, the Crazy E pep club, Young Republicans and Democrats, Students Against Drunk Driving and even those for kids fascinated with beef steak, Bart Simpson and UFOs.
Since then, school spirit has evaporated, students don't socialize as much and class and racial rifts are deeper than ever, say students and teachers at East High.
"People don't care about school anymore," said cheerleader Chris Trindel.
The Gay-Straight Alliance survived because it had the help of the politically savvy Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network.
Now, the alliance meets as a community group paying $6 an hour to rent an East High classroom one afternoon a week. In an overture to mend fences, the district even pays the group's insurance premium.
The alliance can't use the school's public address system or hand out fliers about meetings, but it can meet under sponsorship of the GLSN.
The Key Club, a civic-service group sponsored by the Kiwanis Club, is the only other former extracurricular club now renting space to meet at East High.
Other banned clubs died for lack of adult volunteers and the money to pay rent and insurance premiums.
The allowed groups -- science, math, language clubs, athletic, debate and drama teams -- attract mostly white, college-bound students. Others either don't share the academic and athletic interests or feel unwelcome.
And unfortunately, those hurt the most are students whose after-school links to the school are tenuous, said science teacher Camille Lee.
Clubs like Polynesian Pride and the Aztec Club for Latinos used to be a big part of ethnic students' school lives. "Now they're part of nothing," Lee said.
"A lot of the education in this school has been lost," she said. "The kids get the message that it's OK to discriminate."
Ivy Fox, an alliance member and instigator of a petition campaign that failed to persuade the school board to reconsider the ban this fall, said clubs used to be a way for loners to make friends.
"You see a lot of students roaming through the halls alone. They have nobody to sit with at lunch," said Fox, one of three GSA members with a federal lawsuit pending against the district.
Senior Andrew Perkins said he's bitter over lost opportunities. He had hoped to get clubs going for Democrats, environmentalists, even sword fighters.
"It ruined a lot of things I wanted to do in high school," said Perkins, who did get a Computer Club accepted this fall as a curricular club.
Many seniors worry that colleges will snub them in favor of more rounded students from other high schools.
"The books all say colleges look at your GPA, your SAT (score) and your extracurricular activities," said senior Ann Lynch. "It's hard to fill out that last category on your own."
The president of the school board, Karen Derrick, said she would have liked to reconsider the club ban, which was enacted before the Utah Board of Education wrote a policy to guide school districts.
She was voted down in October, though, in part because board members wanted to wait until the lawsuit is resolved. "That was the board decision for now and the 'for now' is an important part of that statement."
By then, the only students who remember what it was like to have extracurricular clubs at Salt Lake's high schools -- the seniors -- likely will have graduated.
Says Lee, the science teacher: "The students in general don't know what they're missing anymore."