The issue of whether or not to include the contributions of the LGBT community in the Capistrano Valley Unified School District (CUSD) curriculum came to head Wednesday night in the school board chambers in San Juan Capistrano.
Activists urging the district to comply with state law regarding LGBT accomplishments in textbooks unloaded on trustees for appointing to its textbook review committee a San Clemente parent who had urged the district to defy the law.
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San Juan Capistrano Patch's Penny Arévalo, who covered the hearing, counted eight people who came up to the podium “to not only express dismay at [Stanley] Wasbin's official position with the district but also to ensure CUSD complies with the law.”
Among them were the mother of three children being taught in the district, an Aliso Niguel High School graduate, the South Orange County president of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and the Gay-Straight Alliance Network's Southern California program director who drove in from Los Angeles.
Some had been tipped off to the meeting by an “urgent bullying alert” emailed by the Orange County Equality Coalition, which noted the state law came about because of schools with histories of student, teacher and administrator bullying of gay, lesbian, transgendered and bisexual youths like those in the CUSD.
Wednesday night's meeting also included school board member Jim Reardon defending nominating Wasbin for a one-year term on the textbook committee after the parent's plea in January that the district not obey the law, which comes with $10 million from the state to implement the new curriculum at CUSD.
“He's been one of the more assiduous members of the committee,” Reardon reportedly says in the Patch report.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.