From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 1996 12:26:46 -0400

Glendale News Press
Box 991
Glendale,CA,91206
Fax 818-241-1975

COMMENTARY ON THE PROPOSED SCHOOL CLUB POLICY
Glendale Unified School Board

By Patricia Nell Warren

The great national bandwagon to "control youth" is gathering speed. First it
was parental permission to get an abortion.  Now it's parental permission to
join a school club.  Where will this spooky trend end?     

Glendale Unified  administrators just broadened the proposed school-club
policy to include all clubs, so it  would not "discriminate"  against any one
club.

What the  proposed policy  discriminates against, and ignores,  is something
called "human nature".  There is a sensitive area of a young person's life,
and mind, that resists this kind of scrutiny. Every young person -- straight
or gay alike --  is threshing out, privately and alone, all the issues about
self and identity and thinking and belief. There are areas where kids don't
want parental scrutiny. The  more that schools and parents and government and
churches attempt to legislate, restrict, control, scrutinize and
strait-jacket kids, the more they will resist.

Is this what Glendale wants?  Students who lie, and hide what they're doing?
Does the community  want a whole flowering of  underground high-school  life
that adults have no input into, or any control over?  If so, then the
district should pass the proposed rule.

Glendale Unified would be wise to look around the country.  In Utah, the
statewide attempt to squelch one gay-straight alliance club sparked youth
marches on the Capitol, as well as the formation of a Utah Human Rights
Coalition with both youth and adult membership.   In Mascenic, NH, a single
attempt to censor books and fire a teacher resulted in a student walkout --
and the school wound up having to restore the censored books anyway.  Right
here in Los Angeles, a single ill-considered action by a school to censor a
student newspaper resulted in an underground paper that became L.A. Youth,
with thousands of student readers. 

 In short, this kind of school stricture usually backfires. Parents and
school districts and church groups who take a hard line are simply not going
to win that way.  Respect, with kids, has to come from the heart, and it has
to be earned, not forced.   I know this because I've learned it working with
teenagers.

Proposed policies  like Glendale's  send a chill down my spine, because they
hark back to strict school policy of the ‘50s.  I grew up in a conservative
rural school district with this kind of restrictive district policy.  Those
rules  did little to squelch  our young questionings about the unfreedoms and
injusticies in American society.  Indeed, they failed to deal adequately with
youth problems of the ‘50s, like the beginnings  of teen pregnancy and
substance abuse  and what we called "juvenile delinquency" in those days.
Today's conservative parents and church activists  who complain about
"liberal permissiveness" would do well to remember the real roots of the vast
social revolts of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Finally, parents who are so out of it  that they need a piece of paper
telling them their kid is joining a club,  have got a problem with family
communication that will not  be solved by district rulings! 

If Glendale Unified passes  this  proposed ruling, these parents will lose.
The community will lose.  Most of all, the kids will lose, because -- once
again, as before in history --  they will be put in the position of either
lying  -- or rebelling.

Copyright (c) 1996 by Patricia Nell Warren
_______________

Patricia Nell Warren has written several bestselling novels, and is a
syndicated  radio commentator and columnist.   Formerly a Reader's Digest
editor, she lives and works in
Los Angeles today.  She serves on the Gay and Lesbian Education Commission of
the Los Angeles Unified School District.