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• Posted March 25, 2026

Inclusive High Schools Benefit All Students, Not Just LGBTQ Teens

An inclusive, welcoming environment for LGBTQ teenagers helps all students attending high school, a new study says.

Cisgender students (those whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth) experience an increase in their own social well-being if they attend a school that promotes openness and inclusivity toward LGBTQ teens, researchers recently reported in the Journal of Adolescence.

These students felt more connected to society, more positive about the future and more accepting of their LGBTQ peers, researchers found.

“There seems to be this exposure effect that as people are around these identities more, they become more positively oriented toward them,” lead researcher Robert Klein said in a news release. He’s a doctoral candidate in psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

For the new study, researchers surveyed 287 cisgender heterosexual teens at 38 schools in Michigan, measuring their openness and willingness to interact with LGBTQ teenagers.

Results showed a slight increase in openness over time, perhaps because they’d had more chances to learn about LGBTQ teens and their issues, researchers found.

That increased openness also led to better social well-being among the cisgender teens, researchers said.

These results jibe with those from another recent study by Klein, which found that LGBTQ teens with a strong sense of self are more resilient against the anxieties of high school life.

That study, published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, involved 367 cisgender heterosexual and LGBTQ teens. The teens were surveyed five times over their first 18 months of high school to track their anxiety levels.

LGBTQ teens had higher levels of anxiety than their peers, but those with high self-esteem showed the largest decreases in anxiety as time wore on, the study found.

“Symptoms of anxiety are universally experienced, but having strong self‑esteem is very protective, particularly for LGBTQ youth," Klein said.

The two studies support efforts to promote self-esteem and affirming environments in high schools, for the benefit of all students, researchers concluded.

More information

Drexel University has more on promoting inclusion in the classroom.

SOURCE: Cornell University, news release, March 20, 2026