State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was forced out of a Chino Valley Unified School District board meeting July 20 after speaking out against the district’s proposed policy that would require parental notification of transgender students.

According to a news release from Thurmond’s office, Chino Valley USD students had reached out to Thurmond to request help due to feeling bullied and mistreated. Thurmond took the mic at the meeting to oppose the policy as antithetical to how trans students should be supported in schools.

Following his allotted one minute of remarks, Thurmond was berated by the CVUSD Board President Sonja Shaw, causing him to return to the podium and ask for time to respond. Shaw shouted at him to sit down amid cheers and boos from the crowd before he was confronted by security and left.

After a contentious meeting where the district received 83 requests for public comment, the board ended up adopting the policy, which Shaw called a “safeguard to parental rights,” according to published reports. The policy states in part that parents and guardians are to be notified if their child is involved in violence, expresses suicidal ideation, or requests to be identified by a gender other than the gender assigned at birth, according to a district news release.

After the meeting, Thurmond shared with reporters: “Forced outing policies harm everyone — students, parents and guardians, families, and school staff. What CVUSD has done may be in violation of state law. We will be working closely with the State Attorney General’s office to verify and enforce California law.”

Thurmond noted that while some parents and guardians are advocates and allies, not all are or ever will be. Like all young people, LGBTQ+ youth have the right to decide when and how to share their personal details about who they are or who they love, including with their parents and guardians, families, friends and others at school. LGBTQ+ youth and their parents — not politicians — should decide when to have these conversations.

Several recommendations to right California’s legacy of racism that has and continues to deprive African American students of a quality education were included in the state’s highly anticipated reparations report released earlier this summer.

The Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans issued its final report to the California Legislature on June 29. The final report surveys the ongoing and compounding harms experienced by African Americans as a result of slavery and its lingering effects on American society today, and proposes a comprehensive reparations plan in satisfaction of the direction set forth by the Legislature in 2020 with the passage of AB 3121.

The 1,080-page final report includes a chapter on “Separate and Unequal Education,” which chronicles early California laws dictating African American students be taught in separate schools and that school funding be based on the number of white children in each county. In the first half of the 20th century, race-restricting housing covenants and “redlining” policies segregated neighborhoods, and districts drew school boundaries to create “white only” schools.

“Today, in California many African American students continue to attend unequally funded, under-resourced, and highly segregated public schools due to government policies that continue to segregate many schools and school funding by neighborhood,” according to the report. “Recently, California has tried to provide a more equitable funding system by providing more state money to school districts that serve our poorest students. However, the system does not ensure that the money is actually spent on those students, many of whom are African American children, and there is some evidence that this is a reason that African American students continue to be the lowest performing sub-group in California.”

A chapter on how to address the unequal education environment for African American students includes 16 policy recommendations such as targeting more funding to address racial disparities, recruiting more African American teachers, adopting a K-12 Black Studies Curriculum, reducing racial disparities in STEM fields, and eliminating bias in curriculum and proficiency assessments.

Read the full report at oag.ca.gov/ab3121/report.