The Point of Pride
A proposal to fly the Pride Flag at Analy delivers some surprises
Even school board meetings have surprises when things take an unexpected turn, sometimes during the meeting and other times afterwards.
At last week’s WSCUHSD February board meeting, Aziza Greer and Sabine Wolpert, both student members of the West County Activists club, presented a proposal1 that Analy fly the Progress Pride flag on the following dates:
The month of June for Pride Month.
May 22nd for Harvey Milk Day.
The month of October for LGBTQ+ History Month.
Most of the discussion among board members was not about the proposal itself but about the steps in the process from presentation to discussion to vote. At the meeting, Board President Julie Aiello read a prepared statement, which said, in part:
“We support your efforts to make our schools more accepting for all students. I’d like to clarify the board’s decision-making process and apologize for any confusion or misunderstanding.” She called out Trustee Debbie Ramirez for circumventing this process and giving bad advice to the student group, which caused them to not show up in January. Ramirez said students had found that “WSCUHSD board policy allows for this sort of request to be allowed by resolution of the board.” (Policy 6115: Ceremonies and Observances). Board President Aiello insisted that the this proposal must be presented in one meeting and voted on in a subsequent meeting, allowing the item to be noticed to the public. This was confusing to the students, and probably most readers, but this process isn’t really what matters, although it does matter to the board who must conduct its meeting according to laws such as the Brown Act.
After the meeting, I was confused by what was happening behind the scenes. I followed up with several board members and heard what they had to say. Yet when I talked to Aziza Greer, I thought that what Aziza had to say matters the most. What follows is based on my conversation (via Zoom) with Aziza, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns and who is describing what happened in their own words. You might find it surprising in a good way.
“At the beginning of the school year, we were just brainstorming, looking for smaller things that we could do on campus to just help support students and to still continue our activist work, even though a lot of things now fell to the DEI committee,” said Aziza. “So I guess I was the one who originally suggested it, but it was just like an idea that came up.
“We talked to our faculty advisor, Ms. Ambrose. What are the steps that we need to take to do this? We learned that we had to get the board’s permission just because it's on a flagpole at school, which is different from just what administration can let us do. We are also in the process of hanging a flag just in the office and that's one that we don't actually need board approval for because we asked the office staff and they all said yes. We wanted to order the flags at the same time.
“We needed to propose it to the board in some kind of way and this is where I think the miscommunication between us and the board really started. There's nothing on the school website that tells students how you bring your voice to the board.
“I reached out to (Superintendent) Chris Meredith asking if we could come to a board meeting and propose this. This was back in December. He said we've already set the agenda, but you can come to public comment and present it, and then you can come (to another meeting) and discuss it, and then you can come (yet again) and it can be an action item.
“We were like that seems a little bit complicated. So I replied to (Superintendent Meredith), saying it seems a little bit redundant for us to come to public comment and then just do a presentation. Could we come and have it be an action item in January? We're not going to come to public comment.
“I completely understand the process now. But I wish that I could have understood it right at the beginning and I wish that It had been like very clearly laid out somewhere. It felt a lot more personal than I guess it was. I just I wish that there had been something on the school website saying that if you want to go to the board, this is what you need to do..
“Before we came to the February meeting, (Trustee) Lewis Buchner reached out as a the board representative just talking to us. He said you need to come and give a presentation, but we'll vote at the next meeting two weeks later. And so I was like, okay, we'll see you there and (then again) for the voting. So it is my understanding that they will vote on it next week (March 6th), actually.”
After Aziza Greer and Sabine Wolpert read the first half of the proclamation that they had written, they sat down, and listened to the Board members go back and forth about the process, which had nothing to do with their proposal. During public comment, two adults came to the podium to speak on behalf of flying the Pride flag.
Krista Mason of Sebastopol said that it was important for the school to show support for LGBT students. She said the idea that approving a Pride flag might open the school to having to fly other inappropriate flags was “a false equivalency.” She closed by saying: “If you want to create a safe and inclusive environment, you can start now.”
Jonna Thomas, an attorney, said that she and her wife of 15 years had come to Sebastopol and “moved our three children here to get away from the culture wars.” She said “Sebastopol is about as a safe as it gets for LGBT+ kids but we shouldn’t take it for granted. Raising a rainbow flag is an important message to our community.”
As an observer, one might expect strong support for the Pride flag despite any squabbles over the board process. Then, before public comment ended, a surprise came in the form of a young man in shorts who walked to the podium. “My name is Dylan Arendt. I’m a senior and a member of the activist club. I’m male and my pronouns are he/him and I’m bisexual.” Then he added the unexpected: “I’m against flying the Pride flag.”
Dylan explained that he saw the Pride flag as representing “left-leaning politics, and positions such as pro-abortion and pro-immigration.” He called the flag “a bandage on a bullet wound.” He said “It’s about being left and it divides us.” He said that he had worked to facilitate more discussion among students, some who stay only in cliques. Dylan said that he’s been President of Speech and Debate Club. and that he has experienced discrimation as a bisexual. “Flying the flag will make us even more divided.” He worried about how more conservative students might feel and mentioned how flying a MAGA flag would feel to the whole school community.
It turns out that what Dylan said in the meeting was a surprise to Aziza. “Yeah, I was not expecting that at all,” said Aziza. “I respect Dylan tremendously. He is the Speech and Debate President and I've known him since fourth grade, actually. I've been lucky enough to get to witness his public speaking a lot, and he's a really powerful speaker and it takes a tremendous amount of courage to get up in front of the board and me and Sabine as well. He just voiced that opinion and it totally threw me off and I was like, I just had to process it for a little bit. Yeah, because neither of us had any idea that he even felt that way.”
“I totally support him trying to get people together and talk it out and stuff like that. I do agree that, unfortunately, the flag has political implications. And I do regret that because I wish that we could just show our support for this community without having it have some kind of deeper meaning. Maybe if we were asking to fly (the flag) year round, that would apply a lot more, but we're asking to fly it in on May 22nd, which is Harvey Milk Day; for June, which is Pride Month, which students really aren't even in session for — our last day here is like June 6th, and October, which is Pride History Month. That's 62 days of the year, and 25 of them students aren't even in session for. So I feel like, at this point, the political implications don’t have as much weight to them as just the pure showing of support.
“Dylan also made a point about it being like a band-aid over a bullet hole, which I do agree that our school has a lot of things to fix with how they view the LGBTQ community, especially with options on campus, like gender neutral restrooms. We really only have four of them and one of them is supposed to be faculty only, but the teacher that has it, she's just really kind and she lets nonbinary students and gender neutral students use that restroom.
“We have a lot of things like that to still figure out, but this bullet hole in question is centuries and generations and lifetimes of discrimination and the band-aid is having these students who belong to these minorities and feeling incredibly insecure and unsafe about it look up at this flag and feel like, if they really need to, they can go to admin, because admin has supported flying this flag on their campus. And it means that they're going to be receptive and supportive of what this student is going through. I do think a lot of LGBTQ plus students go through that discrimination, the bullet hole of discrimination on campus.”
I asked Aziza if their class or even their generation is leading a charge to make changes that others haven't been able to do in the past.
“Absolutely. It's so incredibly new for people to even be receptive towards LGBTQ+ minorities, especially kids who belong to these minorities, especially high school students. I don't really know if I can compare our generation with past generations because it's something exclusive to us that we even have the authority and that we even have the ability to stand up in front of the school board and say that we want to show our support for these kids. In my parents generation, and my grandparents generation, students would have been expelled for something like that.
“The current political situation in the world is just a little bit more receptive and open to topics including LGBTQ+ communities, and that's why we actually have the power to do that and take it further.”
As a closing thought, Aziza said: “I want to drive home the point that this raising of a flag is not a political declaration of our school. I just want to know that kids who went through like the yearbook deadnaming last year and who have experienced discrimination on campus and who have been bullied for their identities, I just want to be super clear that the raising of the progress pride flag on campus is just a declaration of love and support for those students who are trying to make it through public school. I think like Dylan's point about it having political implications is incredibly valid and it's unfortunately very true. But I think in this situation specifically we need to separate those two and view it as a show of support.”
The genuine way Aziza responded to Dylan’s comments by respecting him and acknowledging his views surprised me, and Aziza found an even stronger way to express support for flying the Progress Pride flag on campus — a declaration of love and support for LGBTQ+ students.
What could be another skirmish in the culture war can be averted, and in its place, there can be something much more thoughtful, nuanced and surprising, a dialog among the students — Aziza, Sabine, Dylan and all others included — as well as faculty, administration and school board and that, too, can become a point of pride for Analy.
The students’ proposal should be on next Wednesday’s school board meeting agenda for discussion and vote.
Great reporting
Admirable young adults
I love this article. These kids are so brave.