By Lisa Storment,
As a result of a unilateral action by David Bell, President of the Sonoma Valley School Board, in removing the Pride Flag from the Sonoma Valley Unified School campus in February 2026, a team of people – including parents and students – formed a Pride Flag and Advocacy Group. This team came together to advocate for the rights of youth who felt very much impacted and targeted by this deliberate action. The district’s own YouthTruth survey shows the stakes:
Twenty-seven percent of LGBTQ+ students reported seriously considering attempting suicide in the last 12 months. Four percent of non-LGBTQ+ students did. Forty-six percent of LGBTQ+ students felt sad or hopeless for two weeks or more. Twenty percent of non-LGBTQ+ students reported the same. Only 42 percent of LGBTQ+ students feel safe at school, compared to 61 percent of their peers. This isn’t abstract. This is documented harm happening inside our schools right now. The flag isn’t a political symbol, it’s a safety signal telling vulnerable kids they belong. The district has this data. They should be using it to protect students, not manufacturing controversy that makes things worse.
The Pride Flag and Policy Advocacy group, sponsored by Wake UP Sonoma, wrote a letter to Dr. Aimee Carter, Superintendent of Sonoma County Schools, to express concerns about how the Sonoma Valley Unified School District is addressing LGBTQIA+ student inclusion, the manner in which the Pride Flag was handled, and increases in bullying and harassment without adequate training for staff on how to provide appropriate and sensitive intervention. We are requesting written responses from her, as well as a meeting to discuss potential review and next steps.
This is a summarized version of the letter we sent to Superintendent Carter, which focuses on two main issues:
First: The Progress Pride Flag. In January 2026, School Board President David Bell unilaterally ordered the removal of the Progress Pride flag from Sonoma Valley High School without a board vote. Following public criticism, the flag was restored four days later.
Wake UP Sonoma argues that Bell and a majority of the board misunderstand the purpose of the flag, and that their actions and public statements may conflict with California’s anti-discrimination and anti-bias requirements. Our organization asks for a review of whether the district is violating state anti-bias laws.
The letter cites survey data showing significant student support for the flag, high rates of suicidal ideation among LGBTQ students compared with non-LGBTQ students, and lower reported bullying rates after the flag was first raised in 2019. It argues that efforts to remove the flag have made LGBTQ students feel less safe and may have contributed to increased bullying.
Second: Anti-Bullying and Harassment Training. Wake UP Sonoma contends the district has not fully implemented required annual anti-bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination training for all employees.
Although the organization Positive Images began a comprehensive training program in 2024, the contract was not renewed, and only administrators received training, leaving planned staff, student, and parent education incomplete. Our group has raised these concerns with Superintendent Jason Sutter, who said he would review the issue, but we remain concerned the school board may support only minimal compliance, rather than meaningful training.
The letter to County Superintendent Carter makes specific requests. Wake UP Sonoma asks Dr. Carter to address some questions in writing by August 15; to review state policy and to meet with representatives of its advocacy group to discuss the concerns, explore possible state oversight, and ways to improve protections and support for LGBTQ students in the district.
Dr. Carter responded promptly, stating, “I too care deeply about ensuring that every student feels safe, respected and able to thrive in school. The student-safety and school-climate concerns you describe are real, and we are aligned in wanting to deliver solutions that provide safety, access and opportunity to all students.”
She clarified that the title, “County Superintendent of Schools,” can understandably create the impression that she supervises local school districts and their governing boards. However, she pointed out, under California law, each school district is governed by its own independently elected board. She does not have the legal authority to direct the Sonoma Valley Unified School District Board, overturn its policy decisions, require it to place an item on its agenda, or mandate that it contract with a particular training provider.
Concerns alleging unlawful discrimination, harassment, intimidation, or bullying are generally addressed first through the district’s Uniform Complaint Procedures. Appeals of district determinations are handled by the California Department of Education, rather than the County Superintendent. Dr. Carter explained that, although she has limitations, she is happy to explore if there are services and expertise under her authority at SCOE that can offer potential opportunities for the Sonoma Valley community, work with Welcoming Schools. She indicated she is also interested in supporting productive communication with the local decision makers.
Wake UP Sonoma will have a follow up meeting with Dr. Carter, but what is clear is that the community of Sonoma Valley needs to continue to show up at School Board meetings, be very loud and clear about their concerns and demands, and do the work of protecting the LGBTQ youth in our community.
The most important next steps are for as many community members as possible to show up for the next SVUSD board meetings to state their feelings on this topic. We understand the flag issue will not be addressed until the September 10 meeting. It makes a huge difference for as many community residents as possible to show up, be seen and heard. Please make some time to support the kids at SVUSD. If you want more information about our group, contact [email protected].
Lisa Storment, LCSW, is President of Wake UP Sonoma, and can be reached at [email protected] 707-346-9788
Lisa Storment’s latest argument for Wake UP Sonoma begins with a premise that deserves universal agreement: every student at Sonoma Valley schools should be safe from bullying, harassment and discrimination.
Then the argument goes badly off the rails.
Storment tells us that the Progress Pride flag “isn’t a political symbol.” Apparently declaring something nonpolitical now makes it so. Yet her own article describes an advocacy organization organizing supporters, lobbying elected officials, demanding government action, seeking policy changes, mobilizing people for a school-board meeting and insisting that one particular movement’s flag be flown by a public institution.
That’s political advocacy by almost any ordinary understanding of the term.
And there is a much simpler issue Wake UP Sonoma continually avoids:
**Why does your group get the flagpole?**
Sonoma Valley contains Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, conservatives, liberals and families with countless different moral and philosophical beliefs. Some religious students belong to traditions with teachings about sexuality that differ profoundly from Wake UP Sonoma’s. Their families pay taxes too. Their children attend these schools too.
Where are their flags?
We don’t fly a Christian flag because Christian students might feel more welcomed by it. We don’t fly a Muslim flag because Muslim students might feel affirmed by it. We don’t fly Republican or Democratic flags because students with those beliefs might appreciate the gesture.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
The American flag represents all of us. The school flag represents the school. An advocacy flag represents a particular cause.
Equal treatment means LGBTQ students receive the same protection from bullying and discrimination as everybody else. It does not logically follow that their movement’s preferred flag therefore deserves a privileged position on a government flagpole.
That’s not equality. That’s preferential treatment dressed up as inclusion.
Storment also cites genuinely disturbing statistics concerning LGBTQ students’ mental health. If students are contemplating suicide, adults should take that extremely seriously. Schools should intervene against actual bullying, make counseling available and protect every student who is being mistreated.
But those statistics do not prove the rest of her argument.
A correlation between LGBTQ identification and mental-health difficulties does not establish that flying a particular flag prevents suicide. Nor does it prove that removing that flag causes bullying, much less suicidal ideation. Those are enormous causal claims requiring evidence, not emotional implication.
And using the suffering of vulnerable teenagers as leverage for a completely separate policy demand deserves scrutiny rather than automatic acquiescence.
Perhaps Wake UP Sonoma should also consider something else: students are not political property for adult advocacy organizations to fight over.
Teenagers can be gay. They can be straight. They can be religious. They can reject religion. They can question prevailing cultural attitudes about sex and gender. They can change their minds. They can disagree with Lisa Storment.
And they don’t need adults continually sorting them into identity categories and announcing which symbols the government must display to validate them.
Wake UP Sonoma apparently believes the appropriate response to disagreement is to organize another pressure campaign and instruct residents to be “very loud” until elected officials give the organization what it wants.
Maybe Wake UP Sonoma needs to wake up to the possibility that other Sonoma residents have rights and opinions too.
Indeed, given the organization’s determination to shape what symbols children encounter at school and what messages public institutions should communicate to them, critics could be forgiven for satirically renaming this latest campaign **“Groom Our Sonoma.”**
To be perfectly clear, that’s political satire about ideological conditioning—not an allegation of sexual abuse. But the satire makes an important point: adults should exercise some humility about using public schools to inculcate their preferred social values.
The most revealing sentence in Storment’s article may actually come from County Superintendent Aimee Carter. As Storment recounts it, Carter explained that the independently elected Sonoma Valley school board—not Wake UP Sonoma and not the County Superintendent—governs the district and its policy decisions.
Exactly.
So let’s have the debate.
If the district intends to maintain an official flagpole for advocacy organizations, establish a viewpoint-neutral policy explaining which organizations and causes qualify and give everyone the same opportunity.
If administrators don’t want Christian, Muslim, political, pro-life, pro-choice, environmental, Second Amendment, Pride and a hundred other competing flags rotating through the schoolyard, there’s an extraordinarily simple alternative:
**Don’t fly advocacy flags at all.**
Fly the American flag. Fly the California flag if appropriate. Fly the school flag.
Then welcome every student underneath them.
Protect gay students. Protect religious students. Protect transgender students. Protect politically conservative students. Protect the kid who doesn’t fit into anybody’s preferred category and wants adults to stop obsessing over identities altogether.
That’s inclusion.
A public school doesn’t have to fly your flag to respect your humanity. And believing that nobody should receive an exclusive place on the government’s flagpole isn’t hatred.
It’s equality.
JoJo,
In response, I am submitting comments from the Pride Advocacy Team of Wake Up Sonoma, to address this extremely out of bounds response to my letter.
Let’s call this what it is. This comment on my letter isn’t a careful, principled argument about neutrality — it’s zero-sum thinking dressed up in the language of fairness, and by the end it drops the disguise entirely.
The whole piece hinges on treating recognition as a scarce commodity. “Where are their flags?” is only a serious question if you’ve already decided, without saying so, that visibility is a competition with a fixed number of seats — that any acknowledgment given to one group must be stolen from another. It isn’t, and it doesn’t work that way anywhere else in civic life. Nothing about a Pride flag on a school flagpole removes anything from a Christian student, a Muslim student, or anyone else. Schools make targeted, non-proportional gestures constantly — moments of silence, commemorative months, memorial displays — without anyone demanding an identical gesture for every other group as the price of fairness. The actual question was never “does everyone get equal shelf space.” It’s “is there a documented reason this group needs attention right now.” The author never answers that question because the zero-sum framing lets him avoid it entirely.
The same sleight of hand shows up in how he handles the suicide-risk statistics. No one is claiming a flag is a medical intervention. The claim is that public acknowledgment is one piece of a broader climate correlated with reduced risk for a population with a well-documented, elevated suicide rate. Waving that off as “emotional implication” and demanding a standard of direct causal proof that no single policy anywhere could ever meet isn’t intellectual rigor. It’s a rhetorical trick — set the bar somewhere no argument could clear, then declare victory when it isn’t cleared. This demands an impossibly narrow, direct causal link to dismiss broad, valid public health data. Mental health deterioration isn’t caused by a single isolated event, but by the cumulative weight of chronic social stigma, rejection, and forced invisibility. The Trevor Project’s National Survey shows that 36% of LGBTQ+ youth seriously considered suicide in the past year. However, a peer-reviewed systematic review in the Journal of Adolescent Health proves that when schools introduce visible, identity-affirming environment cues, LGBTQ+ youth report nearly 40% lower odds of attempting suicide. The flag acts as an environmental macro-affirmation. It is a literal suicide prevention tool.
And then there’s the “Groom Our Sonoma” line, which is where the mask comes off completely. The author spends paragraph after paragraph solemnly warning that teenagers shouldn’t be treated as political property, shouldn’t be sorted into categories by adults fighting proxy wars — and then, in that same breath, reaches for the single ugliest accusation available in this entire debate and aims it at an advocacy effort trying to protect LGBTQ kids from bullying and suicide. “Just satire, not an accusation” is not a disclaimer. It’s a loophole — a way to plant the most damaging insinuation possible while keeping a technicality of deniability in reserve. Nobody accidentally reaches for that word. It is chosen because of exactly what it does to a reader’s gut reaction, and no amount of italicized qualification afterward un-plants it. Inclusive policies do not actively recruit or persuade students into an identity; they provide safety for the students who already exist on campus.
This is not a new rhetorical move, and it’s worth naming the pattern instead of pretending it’s original to this letter writer. Recasting advocacy for LGBTQ students’ basic safety as predation dressed up in euphemism is a talking point that has been recycled across school-board fights nationwide for the last several years — a way to make ordinary requests for inclusion sound sinister without ever having to argue against inclusion directly. It lets someone avoid saying “I don’t think LGBTQ students deserve this acknowledgment” out loud, because that’s a harder sentence to defend in public. Instead, the argument gets laundered through “fairness” language and then, when that runs out, through insinuation. That’s not a coincidence of phrasing. It’s a strategy, and it shows up here in close to textbook form.
Genuine neutrality is a position worth debating honestly. This letter isn’t that. It’s zero-sum reasoning that runs out of road and reaches for the ugliest tool in the drawer when it does. For a student body that is statistically safe, an unadorned flagpole feels neutral. But for a student demographic that faces systemic bullying, a bare flagpole does not communicate neutrality—it communicates a passive bystander. Invisibility is not safety.
True equality does not mean treating unequal situations exactly the same; it requires equity. Building a wheelchair ramp at Sonoma Valley High School is not “preferential treatment” over able-bodied students; it is a necessary accommodation to ensure equal access. The Pride flag is a psychological ramp. It ensures that students who face distinct hurdles to their survival can enter campus knowing they are safe to learn.
Finally, I will say, fostering an inclusive environment is not an optional “adult social value”—it is a statutory mandate. Under the California Safe Place to Learn Act (California Education Code sections 200–220), SVUSD has an affirmative, strict legal obligation to maintain a school climate free from discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The California Department of Education explicitly recommends visible, supportive environmental materials to meet this mandate.
JoJo, your arguments hold no water here. Your position looks to us like nothing more than discriminatory outdated and extremist thinking that you are trying to dress up in the words of equality, trying to flip the argument, that is unfortunately taking hold across the nation. We won’t let that happen here.
Pride Flag Policy Advocacy Team of Wake UP Sonoma
No straight students think about killing themselves because they are straight.
No straight students have ever been abused or abandoned by their family, friends, church, student club, or school because they are straight.
No national organizations promote prejudice and hate against them, and lobby for laws that marginalize, stigmatize, and punish them for being straight.
No other student groups are targeted for legal degradation. Only lgbt+ people are rejected by family, friends, schools, and well funded and organized segments of society for who they love. Only lgbt+ people are still denied the full equal protections of the laws.
The school sends a message of safety and acceptance by flying the Pride flag every day.
Removing the flag, sends the message they are not accepted, reinforcing the prejudice that they should be shunned, punished, or worse.
The school should fly the Pride flag every day until the anti lgbt+ laws have all been removed and they stop promoting new ones.