A meeting in the tiny school district of Sunol, a small unincorporated community south of Pleasanton, descended into chaos Tuesday night as the entire audience was thrown out shortly before the three-person school board passed a resolution to bar the district from flying the Pride flag.
Over 100 supporters and opponents packed the board meeting in a small cafeteria covered in student art and Walk-A-Thon posters. Hecklers shouted abuse at board members and each other. Board members engaged in intense, semi-civil debates. During the course of the evening, the board president, Ryan Jergensen, demanded on multiple occasions that sheriff’s deputies physically remove “disruptive” parents and others from the meeting.
In the end, prior to a final vote, all attendees were ousted from the room as the meeting devolved into complete anarchy. No one was allowed to return.
Even before the public was thrown out, tensions were high. Board member Ted Romo, who opposed the flag banning, frequently butted heads with Jergensen and board member Linda Hurley, both of whom supported it. Romo accused Jergensen of censorship, then was himself accused by an attendee of acting “above the law.” In another tense moment, Jergensen tried to prevent the district’s superintendent, Molleen Barnes, from discussing the flag resolution during her report or bringing Sunol Glen’s teachers up to address it.
As individual arguments broke out within the crowd, Jergensen repeatedly hit the table, shouting “this is the board’s meeting” in an attempt to call order. Adding to the surreal nature of the meeting was an otherwise staid agenda, featuring reports on enrollment, finances and facility maintenance.
But after these brief interludes, the focus returned to the flag ban. During public comment, attendees opposing the resolution said that the board was “betraying the public trust” and creating a “potential economic crisis.”
“Gay people don’t have an agenda other than to grow up, have friends, get married, and get a job,” said Laura Oka at the meeting. “The pride flag is not a special interest flag, gay people are not a special interest group.”
In the end, the resolution passed 2-1, even as shouts and disorder could still be heard outside the meeting room. After the audience was kicked out of the meeting, some supporters of the resolution claimed they were physically attacked.
In the broader Bay Area, few would have predicted that one of the first tendrils of the educational culture war that has spread across the country and California would manifest in Sunol, a tiny East Bay town of 800 people. But after the board of Sunol Glen Unified School District vote on Tuesday night, some parents say that it has.
“This about them wanting to inflict harm on a group they disapprove of,” said Joel Souza, a parent and filmmaker based in Fremont, of the board resolution. “Another shot in the culture war.”
For years, parents considered Sunol Glen, an elementary school located in a bucolic valley near Pleasanton, to be a cohesive, tight-knit community. At least one such parent, Diana Rohini LaVigne, said she chose the school in large part because of its messaging around diversity and inclusivity. The school had a social justice committee and supported resolutions surrounding equity and inclusion.
But after the 2022 school board election, which elected an entirely new board, some parents say things quickly changed. According to Rohini LaVigne, suggestions soon surfaced in school board meetings about creating committees that would vet books, among other items that represent current national conservative talking points surrounding education.
Then, in June, a Pride flag was ripped off the chain link fence around the school. To protect it, school officials hung the flag on the school’s flagpole along with the California state flag and the American flag.
Soon after, the school board introduced a resolution that would only allow the school to display “flags required by law”–the California flag and the U.S. flag.
Although the resolution did not specifically mention the Pride flag, parents and community members said they had little doubt what it was targeting.
Beyond concerns about the resolution operating as a manifestation of bigotry directed at LGBTQ community, a group protected by law in California, some parents said the resolution could have a chilling effect on the enrollment of out-of district students, without whom the school would be unable to function. Seventy-five percent of the approximately 270 students at Sunol Glen come from out of the district.
Jergensen said the flag resolution was misunderstood, and that this resolution would treat everyone the same by not prioritizing any group’s flag over another.
“I have been misrepresented, and the resolution I feel has been misrepresented,” Jergensen said. “I feel like what we have before us is the most inclusive action possible.”
Others in support of the resolution said that the U.S. flag already represents inclusion. One speaker said that discrimination against the LGBTQ community in Sunol was a “made-up premise.” Anthony Rubio, a Sunol resident, said that resolution would “limit distractions and exposure to special interests not related to the school’s curriculum.”
In the hours leading up to the meeting, parents like Souza, the Fremont filmmaker, warned that the flag resolution was likely to turn a small elementary school into a political battlefield between parents.
“They’re pitting people against people, school families against school families,” said Souza. “Things have the potential to get ugly.”
On Tuesday night, they were.
