By Leigh Cavalier, Founder, Sonoma Schools Alliance
The flag is still flying. That is worth saying plainly, because one man already tried to take it down once.
In January, Board President David Bell, acting alone, ordered the Progress Pride flag removed from Sonoma Valley High School. He did not bring it to the board. He did not put it to a vote. After four days of public outcry the flag went back up, Bell apologized for not going through the board, and a published legal analysis by attorney and former trustee Helen Marsh concluded he had lacked the authority to order it down in the first place. Now the same question returns to the same board this fall, this time through proper process. The community should understand what that process is being used to attempt: to accomplish quietly, with a vote, what could not be done by one man’s hand.
Before the board acts, look at what the district itself knows about its students.
This spring, the high school administered the “YouthTruth” survey, a national instrument, and broke the results out by whether students identify as LGBTQ+. The findings are the heart of the matter. Twenty-seven percent of LGBTQ+ students reported that in the past year they had seriously considered attempting suicide. Among their non-LGBTQ+ classmates, the figure was 4 percent. Nearly seven times the rate. Forty-six percent reported feeling so hopeless for two weeks or more that they stopped doing usual activities, compared to 20 percent of their peers. Thirty-four percent reported being bullied, against 10 percent.
These are not numbers from an advocacy group. They are the district’s own numbers, from the district’s own survey, about the district’s own students.
The district also asked students directly about the flag. Of 571 who responded, 39.4 percent rated it important to them, 30.5 percent were neutral, and 30.1 percent said it was not important. I mention all three figures because the honest way to read a survey is to report what it says, not to fold the neutral responses into the side you prefer.
The first sustained complaints about the flag came only after Bell took it down. I attended both the June 11 and June 18 meetings and counted the public comment myself. Three adults spoke against the flag. Not one student did. Speaking to keep it were fourteen adults, eight current students, and one alum, and every student described the same thing: that the flag helped them feel they belonged. A letter from Congressman Mike Thompson, read into the record, urged the board to keep it.
Trustee Ann Ching, who has served on this board longer than any of her colleagues, said she had never received a single complaint about the flag in all her years. Trustee Catarina Landry suggested a compromise, that the flag fly in June only, on the grounds that some students and adults in the community found it uncomfortable. She named no number and produced no complaint, no email, no letter. A flag that appears for one month and disappears for eleven does not tell a student they belong here. It tells them they belong here sometimes.
This is not a legal fight, and I am not going to pretend it is. A school’s decision about what flag it flies is the school’s own speech. The board has the authority to make this choice. That is exactly why the choice matters. When you are free to say anything, what you choose to say is a measure of who you are.
So, this fall the board will decide, on the record and in public, whether to keep a flag its own students have said it makes them feel seen and welcomed in their school. The district gathered the evidence. The district knows what the evidence says. The only question left is whether the board will honor it.
The flag is still flying. Whether it keeps flying is up to us, and up to the five people we elected to look at their own data and do right by every student under their care. Read the record. Come to the meeting. And ask them to keep the promise this flag already made, that every student belongs here.
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