Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt signed SB 894, barring school anti-bullying policies from naming protected student classes

On July 10, 2006, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt signed CCS/HCS/SS/SCS/SB 894 into law, a wide-ranging education bill passed by the Missouri General Assembly that required every school district in the state to adopt an anti-bullying policy no later than September 1, 2007. The act created a new statute, Section 160.775, directing each district's policy to be "founded on the assumption that all students need a safe learning environment" — while requiring in the same breath that district policies "treat all students equally and shall not contain specific lists of protected classes of students who are to receive special treatment."

The clause applied on its face to any category of student, but its practical effect was to bar Missouri school districts from naming LGBT students — the group most consistently identified, nationally, as a primary target of school bullying — as a class entitled to explicit, enumerated protection, even as the state made adoption of an anti-bullying policy mandatory for the first time. LGBTQ-rights researchers later catalogued the anti-enumeration clause as part of a broader 2006 legislative pattern of stripping specifically-named protections for gay and lesbian students out of otherwise mandatory statewide school-safety policies.