To duck LBGTQ+ debate, Clovis Unified goes scorched earth on facilities use | Opinion
Rather than allow an LBGTQ+ community group to meet in a Clovis Unified School District facility, no outside organizations get to do so.
None of them. Not those affiliated with religious organizations (Fellowship of Christian Athletes and Good News Club), youth fostering organizations (Boys & Girls Clubs) and organizations whose mission is to inspire the minds of young scientists and engineers (Destination Imagination and Bricks4kidz).
Between the hours of 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., the use of all school facilities by outside groups is expressly forbidden from now on. Forget it. Don’t even bother asking.
Hundreds of reservations are canceled as a result. Just to prevent the LBGT Community Network from holding an afternoon story hour at an elementary school attended by the child of a group director.
That may not be a complete, or completely fair, portrayal of the CUSD school board’s recent 5-2 vote to rescind the use of facilities by external groups during instructional hours.
But it’s certainly how this picture appears to those of us peering in from the outside.
As an unidentified male speaker told board members during last Wednesday’s meeting: “What it looks like is that you guys changed the rules when someone you didn’t like came along.”
Agreed. That’s absolutely what it looks like.
District officials have a different view, certainly. In response to my questions, spokesperson Kelly Avants said the board’s decision was driven by a need to utilize facilities during the school day “for the academic enrichment of our students.”
Clovis Unified facilities are in evidently high demand. Last year, according to Avants, the district processed “well over” 35,000 requests from “homeowners associations, boys and girls clubs, adult sports leagues, faith groups, visiting performance troupes, and hundreds of others.”
“It isn’t an exaggeration to say that our facilities are in use 10-12 hours a day, almost every day of the year,” Avants said via email.
During Thursday’s meeting Clovis Superintendent Corrine Folmer mentioned a fast-growing school chess club that recently couldn’t gain access to a larger room because another group had already booked the space.
That should never happen. These are school facilities, so of course school-affiliated clubs and organizations should get first priority to utilize them during the school day. No arguments there.
District ‘management problem’ removed
But is that really what this is all about? Yes and no. A source familiar with the board’s thinking told me the decision had just as much to do with removing “a management problem.”
Apparently, too many workforce hours near the top of the organizational chart were being consumed by the facilities usage issue and detracting from the district’s primary mission of educating students.
So board members decided it was simpler, and eventually cleaner after the initial negative press, to make the rules uniform for everyone.
Could Clovis Unified officials have avoided the whole thing by granting the LBGT Community Network the same access it gave to other groups? Quietly and with little to no fuss?
I tend to think so, but that’s hardly a given. School board meetings are pretty unhinged these days. It should be noted that the vast majority of public speakers who lined up Wednesday night did so to air their views on transgender notification policies — a topic that wasn’t on the agenda nor discussed by the board.
For anyone wondering, the district’s transgender notification policy is that it has no policy.
But regarding the use of school facilities by outside groups, Clovis Unified policy is clear. District officials were just fine picking and choosing on a case-by-case basis until a case came along that made them queasy.
Lacking the stomach for any LBGTQ+ controversy, board members went scorched earth instead. From the outside, at least, it looked amateurish and totally unnecessary.
