By William Morris, Des Moines Register
AI-assisted summary
- Danielle Yonemura is suing Des Moines Public Schools following the suicide of her 13-year-old daughter, Leilani Gonzalez.
- The lawsuit alleges that Harding Middle School staff bullied Gonzalez due to her sexual orientation and gender identity, and that excessive suspensions contributed to her declining mental health.
- Yonemura claims the school failed to provide support and that officials displayed hostility towards Gonzalez’s identity.
This article includes discussion of teen suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, dial 988 for the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Danielle Yonemura says she understands that when children act out, school officials need to take actions to correct and redirect them.
What happened to her daughter, she says in a new lawsuit, went far beyond that.
Leilani Gonzalez, 13, died by suicide in March 2023 after what her mother says was frequent bullying and conflict at Harding Middle School because of her sexual orientation and gender identity.
Yonemura is now suing Des Moines Public Schools, alleging that not only did some of Leilani’s bullying come at the hands of teachers and school officials, but that Harding’s response, a series of lengthy and escalating suspensions for Leilani, left her isolated and contributed to the decline of her mental health.
The district did not reply to a message seeking comment. In court filings, it has denied wrongdoing and suggested it will seek to invoke various forms of legal immunity against Yonemura’s suit.
In an interview, Yonemura said she pleaded with school officials for help supporting her daughter and got nothing in reply.
“You can’t just label children a problem and just say, ‘Oh, we’re going to just keep resuspending you and re-suspending you and then think that that’s going to solve the problem,'” she said. “That’s not going to solve the problem. That’s going to make all the problems worse. And in my case it definitely did, because in my case my child ended up taking her life.”
Lawsuit accuses school staff of hostility to non-binary student
Yonemura described her daughter as smart and headstrong, the “therapist friend in her group (who) was always trying to help everybody.”
Leilani also from an early age questioned her gender and sexuality, and at different times after age 10 went by either male or female pronouns, Yonemura said. When she had crushes or dated, it was with girls.
“She was really interested in how many different (LGBTQ+) flags there were,” her mother said. “She loved coloring all the different flags, and so she would draw pictures of all of them and hang them up on her wall, all over the place.”
Provided By Danielle Yonemura
In middle school, she said, her child’s outspoken orientation began drawing her into conflict with her peers. In her lawsuit, she alleges Leilani “was bullied by other students and faculty … regarding her perceivedsexual orientation, gender identity, and mental health disabilities.”
When Leilani sought help from administrators, she alleges, DMPS “suspended her on a pretext.”
The complaint also describes specific inappropriate conduct by school officials. A teacher allegedly refused to use Leilani’s preferred pronouns and “mocked the child in school.”
A counselor told Yonemura that she “couldn’t change how the teachers and students felt” about Leilani’s gender identity and she would “have to learn to deal with (bullying).” A principal made comments suggesting Leilani’s problems “were due to being raised by a single mother.”
In an interview, Yonemura said the attitude of school officials could be summed up as “sorry, not sorry.”
“I wasn’t asking them to change their opinions on anything,” she said. “My child was asking that they just respect his pronouns, at the time, and then also just them as an individual, and the teachers would blatantly just disrespect him, which would clearly upset him.”
How long can students be suspended?
Yonemura said Leilani was involved in physical fights with other students but contends the district’s response went far overboard, starting with a multiple-week suspension. Shortly after returning from that, she was suspended again for a month, and more followed.
At the end, she was serving a 60-day suspension that would have gone to the end of April, “which at that point, that’s the entire school year,” Yonemura said.
In- and out-of-school suspensions are a common school disciplinary method, but researchers have questioned their effectiveness in dealing with misbehavior, especially when imposed for lengthy periods.
The National Education Association has published research finding that suspensions of 21 days or more are linked to lower graduation rates and that out-of-school suspensions can even negatively affect the other students remaining in school.
In Leilani’s case, the extended time off left her isolated from friends and classmates and led to increased feelings of anxiety and depression, her mother said.
“It was definitely obvious and there was a time to where I was essentially begging them to let her go back to the school and they said that their hands were tied,” Yonemura said. “… She’s not coping well here at home. The school is supposed to be our additional support, so why are you not helping me?”
Despite change to Iowa civil rights act, law still bars anti-trans bullying
Yonemura and her attorney, Amanda Adams, believe the school’s treatment of Leilani was motivated by animus against her gender identity. In an interview, Adams said that while Iowa this year removed protections for gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, a separate statute prohibiting bullying in schools still covers abuse on the basis of gender identity.
For Yonemura, her daughter’s death is all the more painful because of how far the family had come. Yonemura gave birth at age 14 but was still able to graduate from college and launch her career as a nurse.
In May, not long after filing her lawsuit, she earned her Doctor of Nursing Practice and will soon take her exams to be a family nurse practitioner.
“Despite how hard that was, I still did everything that I needed to do to make sure that she had a good life and I wanted to make sure, specifically, that she had a better life than I did,” Yonemura said. “So (she) grew up in a better home, and I wanted to be able to help pay for her college and buy her her first car.”
Since Leilani’s death, she said, the destruction of those plans has left her feeling rudderless and alone.
“It’s not natural to lose a child. There are a lot of days where I wake up and I don’t even want to keep going,” she said. “… I still wake up in the morning and feel like I don’t have a purpose in life anymore because I don’t have my child here anymore.”
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