No one can say that the outcome of last week’s Clark County School District (CCSD) Board of Trustees meeting was a surprise. There has been very little question which direction the proposed trans-gender policy for CCSD was going.
Despite the overwhelming majority of parents vigorously opposing this policy, the four-vote majority on the board was going to press relentlessly forward. All of the focus groups, all of the public workshops, all of the repeated hearings dragging late into the night – the whole thing was really just a dog and pony show. The fact is, these four had their minds made up from the start.
The rationalizations that they gave for their unpopular positions were amusing though. Each exhibited a unique knack for contorting the truth. With the political acrobatics that were attempted, you’d have thought that the trustees were performing a cirque du soleil act rather than a CCSD board meeting.
For example, in the first ring, Trustee Lola Brooks was swinging the facts back and forth with the skill of a trapeze artist. She despaired that there was just no middle ground for both sides to meet. She fretted that the two poles of the debate had started so far away from each other that there was no way to compromise. So the board might as well just launch this issue forward into the air, gonzo-style.
But wait a minute! If there actually was no place for compromise, it was Brooks and her three acrobatic colleagues who were to blame for it. Being so secure in their slim majority, these four never even bothered to make an attempt to meet the other side in the middle. It was always their show, all the way.
It certainly wasnt the fault of the parents. Parent advocates had been pleading for a middle ground all along. Perceiving that a transgender policy was forthcoming, and perhaps even needed, the parents had repeatedly tried in good faith to engage in the process.
Early on, leaders of parent groups invested a lot of time and effort to participate in CCSD focus groups. They had hopes of moving the needle, just a bit, toward language that they could live with. Unfortunately, they quickly found out that the makeup of the focus group had been stacked against them from the start. Their efforts didn’t get anywhere.
During a series of public workshops held last December, parents came out en masse to register concerns and fears about the results of the focus group. They were willing to work toward a middle road to address the needs of ALL children; including, but not limited to, transgender students. But after these meetings, the draft policy was completed by CCSD staff behind closed doors. It wholly ignored the parents’ concerns. Nothing had changed.
Last spring, when the Board brought the circus back to town, the draft language was presented for a vote. Parents were understandably outraged. They overwhelmed the CCSD Board Room which could not contain the crowd. Those who were able to speak, expressed anger and frustration at not having any of their concerns addressed in the document. For that they were criticized, reprimanded and mistreated by the chair of the board herself.
Nevertheless, the parent groups remained determined to have a voice in the process. Parents in great numbers continued coming out to subsequent meetings through the summer, hoping to somehow pull the conversation closer to the middle. But to no avail. Nothing has changed.
Last week, even as the final draft was released and the handwriting was on the wall, parent groups approached CCSD officials one last time. They pleaded that just a few of their concerns be amended to the draft document. Once again, their efforts got nowhere.
After all of that, to hear Ms. Brooks claim, with a straight face, that her hands are tied because the two sides are unwilling to find any common ground — well it was as idiotic as it was insulting. It was quite a contortion act with the truth.
Then, over there in Ring 2, there was Trustee Deanna Wright with her political lion-taming attempt. She tried to pacify angry parents by claiming that ‘just because we don’t agree doesn’t mean that I haven’t been listening to you.’ Unfortunately the effects of this statement was more akin to her climbing into the barrel of a cannon and lighting the fuse.
Wright’s lion-taming act would have felt more sincere if Chairwoman Wright herself had not been so liberal with the whip in showing immense disrespect, spitefulness, manipulation, and condescension towards concerned parents throughout much of the process.
Then in Ring #3, was Trustee Linda Cavazos performin a death-defying highwire act. She insisted that she was only listening to the voices of principals and teachers pleading with her for guidance in handling this troubling matter in their schools. “We have to help them,” she said.
But her balancing act was irrelevant. The confused school staffers she invoked would have had every bit as much guidance from the board if the new policy had been allowed to budge a little towards the center in allaying even a few of the parents’ concerns. It didn’t.
No matter what circus acts of self-justification were performed by these contortionist trustees, the fact remains that their final policy shows an abject failure by them to compromise in any way whatsoever. They have refused repeatedly to meet parents in the middle. They are fully to blame for the political sideshow that this debate has become.
The only one of the four who offered no rationalizations for her vote was the ringleader of the circus: Carolyn Edwards. Of course, she didn’t need to rationalize because she is being termed out of office at the end of the year. So what does she care? Edwards doesn’t have to answer to anyone except the special interests who have always led her around the ring like a monkey on a short leash. Her only role in this freakshow was to imperiously keep her majority in line and to call for the question when the time was right. She played it well.
Wright, Cavazos and Brooks have a lot to worry about now that the big show is over. They will soon find that ringleader Edwards has led them, full steam ahead, over a political cliff. Only they won’t have the same term-limited golden parachute as Edwards, to ease them gently down to safety. The political ground at the foot of the cliff will be jagged and hard when they land.
The trustees have willfully created a situation where the only option for a very angry majority of their constituents is to lobby against the CCSD at the state legislature for greater school choice; and then to pull their kids out of public school. Sadly that is most likely where the show will go on.
But when it does it will be to the detriment of all. Trustee Chris Garvey, who voted against the policy, was absolutely right Thursday night when she said, “I think that there are many things that we (CCSD) do well; a lot of good people doing good things for kids and families. But I can’t fault parents now for taking their kids out of school after what is being done here. If they do, I just feel bad that they will miss out on all of that goodness that is being offered.”
For years, the public education establishment has paid all kinds of lip service to the concept that it desperately needs more parent involvement. Here was a case where the parents were fully engaged. But instead of having their involvement embraced, parents have been marginalized, pushed aside and insulted in this debate. Finally, they have had a revolting policy shoved down their throats against their will. That kind of leadership doesn’t usually set well with the voters.
As local parent Erika Whitmore fearlessly told the trustees last week, “There will be consequences!”
