California school district allegedly erased LGBTQ+ people from curriculum

Cajon Valley Union School District’s (CVUSD) sexual health curriculum has no mention whatsoever of LGBTQ+ people, violating the State Board of Education’s guidelines, an investigation has found.

The Board of Education said that the school in East County did not follow the state’s mandated programs, which says that LGBTQ+ people or issues should be addressed.

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Mark Reagles, leader of the CVUSD’s classified employees union, has worked in the district for almost 20 years. He filed a complaint after he noticed changes after a new board of trustees came into office.

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“They forced the district to create their own sex ed and not follow the state’s mandated programs,” Reagles said.

Reagles told NBC 7 he was concerned that the inclusive culture he had come to know was changing. In particular, he began to worry when the district cut its contract for mental health services with San Diego Youth Services and took down “safe space” posters in classrooms.

The CVUSD board president, Jim Miller, said that removing any mention of LGBTQ+ people or issues made the curriculum “more palatable and proper for our community.”

In response to that statement, Reagles said, “I was kind of flabbergasted when I read that because they’ve always been supportive of inclusiveness.”

The current curriculum is in violation of the State Board of Education’s guidelines because “it does not affirmatively recognize that people have different sexual orientations, it does not mention same-sex relationships when discussing examples of relationships, and it does not discuss the harms of gender stereotypes,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

California is one of only a few states that mandates that educators be inclusive when talking about LGBTQ+ issues in sexual education lessons. The others are Colorado, Oregon, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Washington, and the District of Columbia. The results of this are that the vast majority of LGBTQ+ students are left to figure out how to navigate their sexuality by themselves; a recent study by Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity (URGE) found that ​​less than 8.2% of LGBTQ+ students are receiving inclusive sex education in school.

Since the curriculum in Cajon Valley passed, union members have spoken up about discrimination they are seeing firsthand, such as students questioning their sexuality but not being allowed to discuss it due to the the curriculum’s lessons.

“People are afraid,” Reagles said. “People, you know, they’re afraid of retaliation to be able to speak out.”

Reagles felt that he had no choice but to take action when he filed the complaint in December.

“I felt I had to do something,” he said. “It’s so important to speak up, because if we don’t, then history’s bound to repeat itself.”

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