By David Bolling
A mostly peaceful protest by several hundred students, and as many supportive adults, lined opposite sides of Broadway in Sonoma October 13, to demonstrate opposition to the School Board’s decision against a Pride flag flying at Sonoma Valley High School.
The October 8 decision by the Sonoma Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees to have the Pride flag permanently removed from a campus flag pole – where it has flown since 2019 – came on a 3-2 vote, with Trustees David Bell, Catarina Landry and Jason Lehman winning a contentious struggle that has dominated the Board agenda for the past two months.
That decision eliminates any student participation in the Pride Flag decision and mandates that only the California state flag and the U.S. flag can fly on the four campus flagpoles located on the campus center quad.
The Tuesday demonstration was organized both by SVHS students, who walked out of class at 12 noon, and by a variety of activist organizations, principally including WakeUp Sonoma and gay businessman and community leader Gary Saperstein. The student protest gathered on the high school’s front campus with banners and signs at least 250 strong, in a mostly joyous outpouring of support for the disputed flag.
Madeleine Edwards, Sonoma Sun correspondent and president of the school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance, was part of the protest. “I’ve been advocating for the pride flag because growing up queer, there’s this assumption that you might not belong in every new room you walk into,” she told the Sun. “It’s a really isolating feeling, and as the president of GSA, it’s my responsibility to try to make Sonoma Valley High feel like a place where LGBTQ students belong.”
With one notable exception, the citizen contingent stayed massed along the opposite side of Broadway, periodically chanting support for the students and the Pride flag.
The exception was a wildly agitated anti-transgender activist named Beth Bourne, who is a candidate for the Davis School board and a familiar face protesting transgender student policies and the participation of trans women in sports. Bourne appeared with banners, poster boards and a bullhorn, racing up and down the columns of protesters and challenging both students on one side of Broadway, and adults on the other. At one point she became engaged in a tussle with students who tore up one of her placards, and she tumbled over a K-wall into the student crowd.
Sonoma police tried to manage her manic forays through the crowds, patiently asking her not to interfere with the protest and to stay away from the student demonstration. Ultimately, she was arrested, charged with trespassing and booked into the Sonoma County Jail. She was reportedly released sometime Tuesday evening.
The high school protest resumed Wednesday morning as community members and students joined to assemble and plant hundreds of tiny Pride flags all over the High School’s front campus lawn.
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