MILFORD — Phil Hovey wears his differences where everyone can see them.

He’s Asian-American, is missing a finger on his right hand due to a birth defect and has an artificial leg.

He grew up hearing constant racial slurs, being stuffed into lockers, being beaten up and being "chased" and tackled face-first into the mud by students because he couldn’t run.

On Thursday night, Hovey, now 23, and a master’s degree candidate in education, appeared comfortable in his own skin as a panelist at a forum sponsored by Milford’s Anti-Hate Task Force held at the Parsons Government Center.

Until he started talking.

Correcting state Rep. Richard Roy, D-Milford, Hovey said he’s no longer a student teacher at Kerrigan Middle School in West Haven.

He quit last week, he said, after "the racism, the prejudice, the violence" of both students and his fellow teachers became too much for him.

In what was intended to be — and, for the most part, was — a positive, forward-looking forum, Hovey was one of three panelists to sharply criticize area schools for not doing enough to prevent violence and discrimination against students by their fellow students on school grounds.

After recalling a childhood in Milford schools during which he was tormented daily by his classmates, Hovey switched gears to describe the environment at Kerrigan Middle School, where one teacher refused to look at him when they talked in the teacher’s room and incidents of hostility and exclusion were rampant.

Both students and teachers, he said, have a long way to go when it comes to tolerance.

Allison Hassard was in Hovey’s class at Joseph A. Foran High School. Unlike Hovey, her classmates didn’t find out that she was different until high school. That’s when the swastikas on her locker, the written death threat in the bathroom, and other terrifying threats against her began, simply because she is Jewish.

Too frightened to go to school, Hassard nearly stopped attending. Her mother contacted the schools, the board of education and the police.

"No one seemed to take anything seriously," she said.

Finally, at the suggestion of the family rabbi, Hassard’s mother contacted the Anti-Defamation League. Once that organization became involved, school officials were quick to institute a program called "A World of Difference" and Hassard found herself on a panel telling her fellow students that, "I don’t like it and I was scared and I wasn’t going to be scared again." That program proved her "savior," she said, but once she, Hovey and others left the school, diversity programming "fizzled out."

She urged school officials to make tolerance education part of the everyday curriculum and begin it when children are small.

"High school is a long way for a child to come without having education on diversity," she said.

Likewise, Michael Fiorello, a West Haven high school English teacher, said schools not only need diversity programs but need to diversify literature, social studies and, in particular, health curriculum, so to include the non-heterosexual world.

Current heterosexual-only sexual education, he said, gives gay students the message that "you may never have a loving sexual relationship in your life."