The culture war continues in one North County school district, and gender is the latest front.
An agenda request discussed at the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District’s June 28 meeting dealt with several “culture war topics,” according to board president Chris Arend. He said that while the district wouldn’t be addressing several of them, such as taking a stance on COVID-19 vaccines, it would be reviewing its policies related to gender and sexuality at the Aug. 9 meeting.
“We’re not out of the battlefield yet, as you will see,” Arend said on June 28. “The one area where we had a lot, about half a dozen agenda requests, all had to do with LGBT—uh, I can’t get the whole sequence of letters together. … We are going to have to get with the program here and identify what the program is, because it is really an area not just culturally in flux but legally in flux.”
As part of the discussion, Arend said the district would also be reviewing the nondiscrimination and harassment policy that the board passed in 2020, which one public speaker at the meeting described as singling out gender nonconforming students for special treatment.
“It starts out really good,” San Miguel resident Randall Jordan told the board. “No one should be bullied. No one should be harassed. No one should be belittled. … By the time it gets to the fourth page, all it talks about is transgender.”
That special treatment equates to parents not being notified about gender, pronoun, and name changes if a student doesn’t want them to be notified, Jordan said.
“We’re talking about 13-, 14-year-old kids,” he added. “I think we need to look at this seriously. This is real dangerous.”
One of the board’s main concerns, Arend said, is that the primary individuals who have responsibility for children are their parents.
“We do not want to violate the sanctity of the family and the parent/child bond,” Arend added.
The California Department of Education states that the right of a transgender student to keep their transgender status private is grounded in both state and federal laws and that disclosing that information to others without the student’s permission may violate anti-discrimination law and the student’s right to privacy.
Superintendent Curt Dubost told the board that the Aug. 9 presentation would delineate between what the district is mandated to do when it comes to student privacy, LGBTQ-plus related issues, and teacher trainings on the topic and what isn’t the law. Board members Frank Triggs and Dorian Baker expressed concerns about what they referred to as “compelled speech”—or requiring teachers to refer to students by their chosen pronouns and names.
Triggs said he had requested a link to a presentation sent out to teachers earlier in the year by the Paso Robles High School LGBTQ-plus Advisory Committee. The PowerPoint slideshow included updates on how the school was improving inclusive practices on campus, such as restroom access; kindness, inclusion, and unity training; and what resources teachers could share with students.
“I have to say I’m disturbed by some of the stuff in that training,” Triggs told the board. “You cannot force someone to call a he a she because they’re under the delusion that they are.”
One slide states that the staff was trained on AB 1266, which became state law in 2014 and “requires that pupils be permitted to participate in sex-segregated school programs, activities, and use facilities consistent with their gender identity, without respect to the gender listed in a pupil’s records,” according to the state Department of Education. The slides also indicate that future staff trainings are in the works and provide a five-step guide for “how to do better at getting new pronouns right.”
Board member Chris Bausch expressed frustration with the superintendent and staff, saying he’d asked a month earlier for specifics on what LGBTQ-plus training teachers were currently getting and still didn’t have an answer. During the June 28 meeting, there was some confusion as to whether teachers had actually attended any training.
Dubost clarified, saying that there had been some training but he wasn’t certain what it had entailed.
“It was my understanding that that was only mandated training, but I cannot guarantee you that because I have not completely seen and reviewed with the attorney exactly what was presented,” Dubost told the board. “We canceled some of what was going on when concerns started to arise.”
Bausch told New Times that several parents had reached out to him concerned about the issue. Most of the phone calls, he said, were from parents upset that their daughter might be showering with a boy in their gym class. He said the fact that the district is moving forward with LGBTQ-plus related training isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as it’s done in the proper time and sequence.
But he added that getting parents involved is very important, and that district transparency is his main concern. However the school district decides to proceed with the discussion, it should be conducted openly and honestly, Bausch said.
“People’s fears, people’s hopes, their dreams of what Paso Robles can be. People that feel less than empowered because of their life choices, they need to feel safe. Bottom line. If you’re queer, if you’re transgender, you still have the right to feel safe. I don’t have to agree with your choices, but I have to ensure that you feel safe,” Bausch said. “We’ve got a long way to go in Paso Robles, but parents need to be part of the discussion, in my opinion. … Everybody deserves the chance to come to the microphone, have their say, be listened to, and then we bring it back to the board and say where do we go from here. That hasn’t happened here.” Δ
This article appears in Jul 14-24, 2022.