This morning I had a meeting with Maria, the San Diego Unified School District LGBTQIA+ Liaison. We spoke for over an hour and a half! She’s really wonderful and cares so much about our community. Maria’s role is to implement safeguards and ensuring inclusion among other awesome projects to protect our LGBTQIA+ kids in our public schools. 

As you can imagine she is very upset and deeply disturbed that hate speech and discrimination is taking place at all, let alone on public school campuses. Because the district has so many departments, one being legal, her hands are tied in what she can actually do to stop the current church rental situation. So we discussed other way to be there for our LGBTQIA+ community on campus as well as creating and maintaining a safe space always, even outside of school hours.

We discussed several different strategies and ideas on how to establish more of a visible presence on campus, such as an officer/guard designated solely to inequity crimes. This would allow for more attention to be given to hate crimes and inequity among students and administrators. 

We also discussed how we can reach children whom are struggling to understand their crimes are hate crimes and what they are doing is serious. My biggest concern with this is that SDPD typically isn’t involved in school hate crimes, usually school police are involved and they decide along with the administration what the punishment if any should be.

While speaking with Maria, I also realized that in addition to her there are only 5 other Youth Advocacy Liaisons in her department, so 6 total for over 200 schools. This just isn’t enough. We must work to advocate that the District receive more money to allocate to the Equity and Belonging and Youth Advocacy Department, that way we can have more advocates, on the ground, in our schools available and ready to help our kids. 

Sadly while speaking with Maria I was also made aware of several LGBTQIA+ hate groups. Many of these hate groups started as “anti-masks” groups and have morphed into anti-LGBTQIA+ groups. I’m working on compiling a list of these hate groups so if you know of any please send to me. This is merely for our own safety, but damn does it suck to see such hateful even group names. Many of these groups are also parent led which is heartbreaking. 

Maria and I have plans to reconnect next week once I get some things together we discussed today. 

Shortly after speaking with Maria, I spoke with Farshad, he serves in the Quality Assurance Office with the San Diego Unified School District. An individual named Janette  was also there, she works in that particular department and assists in investigations such as this. Basically what Fershad said was, because of us and our advocacy this case was elevated to his office rather quickly! Side note: Y’all are amazing! 

As Julia had mentioned in her post, his office will basically do an internal investigation into how, as in what did Canyon Springs Church use the facilities for and from there will hand their investigation report to the Chief of Facilities and then to the legal department whom will then determine if LEGALLY, based on policy, anything was violated. Farshad did say that if the outcome is or isn’t what we want because of the policies, we have the ability to advocate that these policies be updated, changed and or modified.

As I mentioned earlier I don’t agree that the district should place responsibility of investigating hate crimes on school police and school administrators. I don’t agree with this approach at all with the information I have been provided and the research I’ve done. If a child commits a hate crime on either middle or high school grounds, I believe SDPD should be contacted immediately. The ages of these children are so critical and they must understand the magnitude of what they are doing now. My suggestion is to create a district wide policy along the lines of—“should a hate crime take place on school grounds the local police must be contacted to investigate.” I understand the concern of some schools not wanting the police involved and if this is an additional safety concern I think it should allow for some flexibility based on this. 

Fershad did ask that we continue to collect evidence on our end. So please email any Canyon Springs Church information in regard to the recent events to ScrippsRanchPrideCouncil@gmail.com.

I also was able to get connected with Marni von Wilpert our local council member for our district. She has elevated the case to SDUSD's President of the Board, Sabrina Bazzo. Hopefully I will hear from her next week. 

Tomorrow I have a call with a GLSEN San Diego to discuss the contracts used to rent spaces to organization through the district and potential inequities within this process. More discussion about what the district and how its policies surrounding equity and justice also should be within these contracts to the lessees and third party facilitators. 

Thank you all so much for all the support! Please keep circulating and signing the petition, it’s working!!!