Although we all hope that our students would be able to attend the school of their choice, sometimes this simply isn’t possible. Especially at sensitive times such as when they first come out, when they socially transition, and when they are going through medical transitions, transgender students often choose to transfer to Independent Study (IS), either permanently or on a short-term basis.
As you may have noticed, IS programs are under fire from California lawmakers. Starting with 2019’s ill-timed AB 1505/7 bills that restricted IS charter schools right before a pandemic, continuing with AB 1316 (which thankfully didn’t reach the governor’s desk), and now with Gov. Newsom pushing further restrictions in his rewrite of Independent Study law, transgender and other at-risk students are facing the clear possibility that they will not be allowed to seek a fair, free, and appropriate education.
The fact is that in-person, full-time schooling does not work for some students, and it is directly harmful for some. And the students that are most harmed by mandatory in-person learning are those who are the most vulnerable. Even restrictions like requiring mandatory daily contact with teachers places an undue burden on students who live in remote places, who are medically fragile, or who choose to homeschool in the real world, free of the narrow restrictions imposed by computer-based learning.
At different points during my children’s educations, we chose to homeschool. We were so lucky to live in Santa Cruz County, where we had our choice of IS programs. My students were full-time public school students while also getting an appropriate education. Both of them are now in college, one at a UC, the other at a small private college. They had their choice of colleges that suit their needs, just as they had their choice of K-12 education that suited their needs.
I beg you to keep our at-risk students in mind when you vote on educational matters. Restricting independent study, whether it’s through a district school or a charter school, is discriminatory and wrong. So many students are saved by that time at home, and go on to happy, healthy, productive adult lives. Furthermore, allowing IS programs to offer appropriate services to homeschoolers keeps those families in the public school system, a win on both sides.
Thank you again for taking time to consider the effect of your votes on at-risk, LGBTQ+ students.
Recently, Rep. Jimmy Panetta reached out to PFLAG to suggest a listening session about issues faced by transgender people, their families, and their communities. The meeting took place in the back yard of the Diversity Center with representatives from PFLAG Santa Cruz County and the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County,. We were graced with the fun sounds of a live band at the regular Friday midtown street party in the parking lot next door.
The goal of the meeting was not necessarily to solve any problems, but at least to gain a sympathetic ear and educate a politician about transgender concerns. Concerns that were discussed at length included three broad areas: healthcare policy, educational outreach, and continuing issues with access to support.
Healthcare policy
Andrea Damon of the TransFamilies of Santa Cruz County cited a statistic from the Kaiser Family Foundation that in 2020: 67% of workers who got their health coverage through their private employer were in self-funded plans. What this means is that instead of contracting with a health insurance company to provide insurance to employees, the business creates its own healthcare group. These groups are not necessarily covered by federal or state law governing health insurance.
If you’re thinking ahead, you already know what comes next: many of these plans do not follow mandates written to regulate health insurance, including health coverage for transgender care mandated under the ACA. Often, business owners don’t realize there is an exclusion, and willingly add trans care when confronted. However, other owners can legally refuse to cover trans care through their self-funded plan.
Most workers have no idea that their “health insurance” isn’t legally required to cover transgender care, and it’s only when they are in crisis with a transgender child that they face barriers to getting appropriate, timely care for their children.
“TransFamilies has worked with several families over the last year who were faced with coverage being denied through their self-funded plans,” Damon says. Results have been mixed; some employers willingly added coverage, while in others, TransFamilies had to “apply pressure” to the board of directors, ultimately convincing two such employers to add coverage.
Rep. Panetta made an enthusiastic request to know more about when self-funded insurance isn’t required to follow insurance laws/requirements, since this is an area under federal jurisdiction.
Educational outreach
Santa Cruz County boasts a robust LGBTQ+ educational program supported by the Diversity Center. This program, Triangle Speakers, will send a trained panel of speakers into any school for any event for free. A similar speakers program in Monterey County is provided by Rainbow Speakers and Friends.
However, access to these programs is spotty, to say the least. Rachel Morales-Warne, a parent advocate whose children attend SLV schools, said that the Triangle Speakers hasn’t been invited to the district in at least the last ten years.
All of the advocates agreed that even when intentions are good, the lack of teeth in the FAIR Education Act (CA Senate Bill 48, 2011) means that it’s up to individual teachers, schools, and districts to decide how inclusive and supportive they will be.
“As an educator, 50 years now, I find it so frustrating that schools are not following what the law says, what we expected them to be doing,” said Lynn J. Walton, retired math teacher and PFLAG SCC Executive Board member. “There are no teeth in it. A lot of teachers have good intentions, but they don’t have the tools to go to the next step. We need to train our teachers so there’s harder conversations.”
Even in “liberal Santa Cruz County,” the treatment of LGBTQ+ students, including bullying, intimidation, misgendering/naming, and shaming, is common. The County Office of Education’s focus on equity in the coming school year, advocates say, is unlikely to make a substantive difference in the everyday experiences of queer kids in our schools if the training and support is not applied more consistently.
Access to support
Michelle Brandt and Andrea Damon (TransFamilies) offered the statistics that underpin everything that advocates do: Kids who grow up in families that support and affirm their gender have wildly better outcomes than kids who don’t.
“Having an affirming, accepting family is the number one indicator for a young person’s mental health, so that’s a big part of what we all do,” Andrea Damon explained. “PFLAG, TransFamiies, and the Diversity Center: for the kids—through the parents but for the kids.”
But support is applied unequally and sometimes it feels like parents have to keep refighting battles that had already been fought by a previous parent.
“You get tired and think, I can’t do this anymore,” Michelle Brandt says.
Rachel Morales-Warne responded more colorfully. “In our house, pardon my language, but I’m like, We’re fuckin’ still doing this?”
Neal Savage, also a PFLAG Santa Cruz board member, pointed out that the way to reach parents in the past doesn’t suit today’s parent population. “When you start expanding the population into Latinx and any kids who are in foster care, those families and those kids aren’t getting help. The number of families that can afford to go someplace on a Tuesday night for a meeting has gotten very small, given geography, money, two jobs. The PFLAG model from 30 years ago is in some ways a middle-class luxury.”
Morales-Warne agrees. “I talk to a cousin’s friend of a cousin because I have a child, because they can’t afford to go to these meetings or they don’t feel comfortable. It’s not necessarily a safe space to live in. I think some of the biggest obstacles are education and language. Not just language as in bilingual language, but the language around what it means to be nonbinary or trans or queer or gay or pan.”
Some takeaways
Rep. Panetta’s job is federal, which informs the areas where he is able to exert influence. Listening to the advocates at the meeting, he responded, “You see the continued need for the resources that are so necessary.” He shared his memories of a powerful meeting the week before about LGBTQ+ experiences moderated by our local State Senator John Laird and hosted by the Diversity Center.
It’s clear that transgender children and adults will benefit from a more focused, united push for understanding, inclusion, and legal protection.
UPDATE: I am pleased to say that AB 1316 is dead on the floor. Thanks to activists like Legislation Take Action for helping to raise awareness of this bill.However, the threat is ongoing.
It’s not news that administrators in public education are generally not fans of alternative education. I live in possibly the most alternative-friendly county in the country… and I could tell you a few stories.
But the tiny, vital community comprised of online public homeschool chartersand alternative schools seems to attract more than the usual share of fear, mistrust, and derision from administrators and legislators.
Late 2019 saw the comically timed AB 1505/7 bills that restricted charter schools, especially ones that provided distance education, from expanding. Get the joke?
The pandemic hit…and what sort of services did everyone need? The punchline! Everyone needed the expertise of these schools that had successfully been providing distance learning for years to get them through shelter-in-place.
(Did the districts go to these repositories of knowledge for advice in how to implement distance learning? Why no, that would be admitting that these charters were providing a useful service. Most public schools chose to reinvent the steering wheel that homeschool educators have had a grasp on for years).
Here we go again
This is what alternative education looks like.
Now AB 1316 wants to chip away at these programs again, providing less money per student, as if students who seek alternative educational options are second-class citizens. Separate? True, they chose to leave mainstream schools. But that doesn’t mean their education should be unequal.
I can’t begin to explain why people who say they are educators want to restrict a mode of education that works for some children.
Could it be that it often works for our high achiever kids who have had it with mainstream high school and take their high test scores elsewhere?
Could it be that parents of kids with special needs, including families that want to retain their linguistic heritage or families who don’t want their kids bullied because of how they look or talk, are voting with their feet?
Who uses these alternatives, anyway?
This is hardly an exhaustive list, but here are examples of the many families I have known, or families served by friends of mine who teach for these organizations:
Smart, focused students who need more than their local high schools will offer
Black and brown kids whose parents want them to grow up with a healthy self-image
Kids with mental health challenges for whom home is the place where they can heal
Kids with life-threatening allergies for whom in-person school is simply not viable
Kids who are top competitors in their field—athletics, chess, dance, etc.
Kids who need to work to support their families
Children of certified public school teachers whose parents know what public school can be like and choose to stay home
Let’s focus on the real problems
This is what alternative education looks like.
Yes, all schools should be “held accountable.” But what does that mean? These schools do not provide “drop the kids off and ignore them” service. If parents consistently rate the distance education that they are overseeing highly, and there is no reason to think that money is being embezzled or spent on bonbons for administrators, that should be accountability enough.
There are a lot of real problems with public education. And despite the (I admit) rather angry tone of this piece (supporters of alternative ed are just, frankly, tired of this), I am a huge supporter of public education. I believe that all children should be educated, for free, for the benefit of all of our society.
But again, I must repeat:
Not all schools serve all children equally well.
Children who need alternatives should get them—for free.
Stop blaming alternatives for lagging mainstream school enrollment. The public school system owns that problem 100%.
I walked up to the front door of my health club and waited. The owner opened the door and beckoned me in; he was not armed with a touchless thermometer.
“You can just walk in now,” he said.
“Well, that makes your job easier,” I replied.
“Yours, too!” he said. “Just scan your card and you’re good to go.”
Here’s the thing: I always knew that getting my temperature taken was jive. The CDC concluded pretty early on that temperature is not a reliable indicator of infection with Covid-19. All that work to take people’s temperature achieved nothing as far as health was concerned; not a single feverish person had arrived at our club in the last year.
So I’m happy enough that we don’t have to do it anymore. However, something positive came with the useless waste of time and batteries: people started to get to know each other.
Making connections
Before Covid, I didn’t know the owner of my club by sight, and certainly had never had a conversation with him. But as club membership dwindled and we were forced to exercise outside (fine for me, since I swim), club employees left, too. Soon it was usually the owner who checked people in, and we got to chatting.
In the past, I was happy to see the front desk manned by one of the more personable employees, but often the young person at the desk was more interested in their phone than the club members. The forced interaction at the club’s front door came from something horrible, but created something meaningful.
As I write, the world at large is gripped—in some places—with a worse situation than ever. The loss of life is tragic. But in coastal California, it really feels like things are getting back to normal. Cars full of kids head to school in the morning. Neighbors who had been out and about during the work day are disappearing back into their jobs.
These changes are part of a return to normal life, but they don’t have to be a return to the parts of that pre-pandemic life that weren’t so great.
Families are spending more time together than they did in their busy, pre-pandemic lives. (And they’re mostly happy about that!)
Adults are rediscovering passions or pursuing new ones.
Some kids have found that distance or hybrid learning actually works better for them.
…and try to make them stick
There’s no reason why we have to go back to “normal.” Normal, well…. normal sucked. The traffic. The overly busy families. The poor being evicted from their homes. The sterile interactions with people in our community. The people whose job it is to connect with you looking at their phones…
Let’s make sure to identify those things in our lives that have improved, and remember that as life gets back to normal, we can make them part of our new normal.
I get lots of requests from parents regarding their students. I am used to accommodating all sorts of needs, and in the online webinar format, it’s very easy to do that. But there’s one request that I’ve received that I will never accommodate, and that’s canceling history or ideas from my courses.
Though “cancel culture” is in the news a lot, let me start by explaining how it works in an online course for children. [Here’s Wikipedia if you want more details.] No matter what subject I’m teaching, whether it’s language, music, or food, we face what I call capital-C Content. That’s content that may not be child-appropriate, may be offensive to some people, or may refer to subjects that are offensive to some people.
My job as a teacher is to decide how to deal with capital-C Content in an age-appropriate manner.
In some ways, this is easy. In my all-ages courses, I tend to skip the personal foibles of historical figures, for example. It’s not necessary to know about a composer’s bigotry unless it’s expressed in the music. But I won’t shy away from age-appropriate discussions that are more central to the subject we are studying, such as Roald Dahl’s unhappy childhood.
In my teen courses, I will address sensitive issues more in depth. I ask students to use our defined standards of behavior and language when discussing issues, but I don’t stop them from addressing them. Teens often have a deep interest in discussing topics that affect their lives, whether it’s a popular writer’s posts on Twitter or their own experiences with discrimination.
“Cancel culture” would have me avoid sensitive topics or cover them with platitudes. Cancel culture asks teachers to offer trigger warnings or to avoid entire topics altogether. Cancel culture also asks us to omit historical complexities when a topic doesn’t align with our modern sensibilities.
What comes up in the classroom
You may be surprised at the topics that come up in classes for kids.
In my music history class, I just had to tell parents that there was no way I was going to avoid all Content…especially in the week that we studied opera! Murder, rape, war, and cultural stereotypes abound.
In my class about food, Yum!, contentious topics come up all the time. Some of my students are vegan and others are dedicated meat-eaters, and that leads to potential conflict.
But it’s in my language courses that we are faced with Content on a regular basis. The history of the English language is fascinating and complex. It’s regularly the case that unsuspecting students share etymological information about a word without even noticing the, ahem, Content that comes along with it. Just think about trying to avoid sex, violence, religion, and bigotry when researching the many meanings and history of these words: head, buck, jazz—even intelligent!
One such situation comes up while discussing the word apoplectic in my vocabulary class. The history of this word really helps students understand just how angry you are when you are feeling apoplectic. Literally, the meaning derives from the symptoms of a stroke, which was referred to apoplexy, which was defined at the time the word was being used as “being crippled, struck dumb.”
Ouch, lots of Content in there. It leads to a discussion of the evolution of the word dumb, from a medical term for something that doctors didn’t understand (being “struck dumb” because of damage to the brain) to the current meaning, “stupid,” which derives from the prejudice that people had against deaf people in the past.
It’s very upsetting for a child to know that there is discrimination in the world, especially if that discrimination hits home. But if I were to cancel all the words with embedded discrimination in them, we’d be left with a language bereft of its complexity and history. Canceling words and their history isn’t the solution—understanding words and their historical context is the solution.
Keeping it age-appropriate
In my all-ages courses, of course, we don’t actually discuss offensive topics in detail. For example, if my student did research on the word jazz and the word gism was in the etymology, I would just simply ignore it and move on. If a student directly asked what it meant, I would say that it’s not appropriate for discussion in our course—and move on.
In one of my writing courses, a young girl used the word “bitch” in the text chat—quoting her teen sisters, who used that word (lovingly!) with each other. As I was reading her writing out loud to the other students, I just quickly said, “oh, whoa, that’s not a word we use in polite society” and moved on. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to discuss it further, so I sent her a private message later.
Teens need to explore ideas in depth
In my teen courses, the controversy over J.K. Rowling’s views about transgender people has been a topic of great interest. It brought up insightful discussions, such as the ethics of enjoying an artist’s work when the artist is someone whose views are repugnant to the reader. Teens are not too young or too fragile to find out that the authors of some of their most treasured stories were not necessarily morally upright people, and our discussions lead to a greater understanding of the interplay between literature and culture.
Nevertheless, I have been asked by students or parents to offer trigger warnings before such conversations take place. But we can’t offer trigger warnings for conversations, given that they haven’t been had yet. All I can do is enforce our standards for respectful discussion. If one of my students started to describe, for example, child abuse in detail, that would be clearly inappropriate and I’d interrupt the conversation. But to say that a teen can’t mention existence of child abuse because it triggers another student? I can’t agree to that.
We have clear rules about respectful language in our courses, and students almost always follow them. We encourage students to speak up when they feel uncomfortable, and they often do. Within the rules for respectful conversation, we have the most in-depth, insightful conversations about difficult topics.
When the student is the one who cancels
Students themselves sometimes buy into the ideas of cancel culture, believing that anyone or anything that upsets them should be dismissed. Those students are the ones who, instead of joining in the conversation or listening to see where it goes, disappear from the webinar with a click. Sometimes we never hear from them again.
This is when I wish I could keep them in the discussion. I always reach out to them after class to try to keep them communicating, because life, they will find out, will not always give them the opportunity just to close the tab and go back to a carefully constructed world. The day that they find out that a valued co-worker has views they don’t agree with, what will they do? Education is more than facts and figures; it’s a preparation for life.
Learn to be a confident messenger
Life doesn’t offer trigger warnings and won’t cancel history as you walk through it. I want my students to be confident messengers for their viewpoints. And in order to do that, they will have to face what the world puts in front of them.
Most of the time—let’s not forget—this world offers natural beauty, kind people, and an amazing and empowering history of humankind. But we do our children no favors by obscuring the challenges that we face in making a safer, kinder, more inclusive culture for all.
