Laila Cronin graduated from South Side Area High School nearly a year ago. But while they’re a first-year student at Duquesne University, they said the rural Beaver County school of 300 students is calling Cronin back.
“I just want to somehow make it a safer environment if I can for future students. Because I know what they’re going through,” said Cronin, who graduated in 2022.
Cronin is one of a dozen South Side alumni, most of them LGBTQ+, who have begun meeting since the district convened what its school board calls a “Pronoun Committee” to determine how staff are to address their students. Now the group has a private Facebook group with about 100 alumni.
The debate began last fall after a teacher publicly said he would not use students’ preferred names and pronouns because it infringed on his religious freedom. District administrations initially suspended him but backtracked in the face of public reaction, and LGBTQ activists are concerned about the direction the debate is taking: Last month, it held a meeting to hear the “biblical perspective” of gender, bringing in two Christian ministers to discuss the matter as residents argued about whether transgender children are sinful.
Cronin, who uses she and they pronouns, said they’re deeply familiar with the feeling of not belonging in the school of community. They said their peers condemned their progressive views — even when Cronin and a classmate were trying to make a safe space for themselves within the school.
They started the Gay Straight Alliance during Cronin’s senior year, and according to Cronin, their posters were often torn down and homophobic slurs were common in hallways. Cronin said they hoped to help both students and teachers who have reached out as they fear losing their jobs if they speak out.
“Not that students in school can’t make a change, because I know I tried to do as much as I could as a student, but at the same time they’re not taken as seriously as adults,” Cronin said.
As similar conversations are playing out in districts across the county, the alumni say they’re also preparing for potential future debates about what can be taught in schools.
Because whatever the pronoun committee recommends, “This is … not the end,” Carrie Wardzinski, an organizer with the progressive group Red, Wine and Blue, said.
How they got here
Elected board members on the committee and the board president declined requests for interviews. But the district’s solicitor, Ira Weiss, said the issue began taking hold last fall when there were reports of teachers disrespecting students’ identities.
Superintendent Alan Fritz sent staff a memo saying they were to respect how a student asked to be identified. Fritz declined an interview but said that the district has a responsibility to ensure that students feel welcome and respected “so that they can learn and receive the public education that they’re entitled to.”
When biology teacher Daren Cusato said he couldn’t comply, he was put on administrative leave pending an investigation.
Cusato called affirming a nonbinary or transgender student’s identity compelled speech that “blasphemes God by calling something that he did, wrong.”
“I don’t hate anybody. I try to love all my students, regardless of their situation,” he said. “But I don’t really believe that loving a student is lying to a student. In my deepest of convictions, I believe that misgendering a student according to their birth, according to what God made them to be, I feel that is not loving the student.”
Students spoke out in support of Cusato, and so did most of the 500 people who packed the next school board meeting.
The board revoked the memo, and Cusato said that now that he is back in class, he is using students’ legal names.
But in November the board also formed the pronoun committee, with the understanding that it would make recommendations for a future policy. Five community members were selected for the committee, along with four elected board members.
The committee has met five times, but it was last month’s discussion of the Bible that seems to have stoked the most debate.
John Goebbel, the pastor of the West Ridge Christian Church in Coraopolis, told the committee that creation can’t be redefined.
“Look, God made us male and female,” he told committee members and roughly 50 members of the public, many with open Bibles on their laps.
“It’s very clear in the Bible, there’s no gray area, there’s no variation," he said.
He said he was helping youth in his congregation who were questioning their gender.
“All I can do is bring them back to the truth and bring them back to Jesus,” he said. “They’re not always going to make the right choices. But I do think it’s important that we love them.”
Jocelyn Johnston, a pastor of the House of Prayer Lutheran Church in Aliquippa, told the committee that God’s word includes spectrums and that being transgender is a natural, biological trait.
“Much harm is done to a person’s mental health when they are told they are demonic, or sinful or deserve to die because of who they are intrinsically,” she said.
She said that Jesus Christ commanded Christians to love their neighbor, a duty that includes “appreciating and cherishing everything my neighbor is and has to offer. … Each person has a right to practice their own faith, and that does not give anyone permission to cause harm to someone by disrespecting them or denying that human dignity.”
Some scoffed at Johnston’s view of the scripture, and during the public comment period of the meeting, most speakers defended religious freedom and said Cusato should be allowed to honor his faith at his workplace.
But while the committee had reached out to hear from differing religious viewpoints on the matter, committee member Metta Denk expressed doubts about discussing biblical perspectives at all.
When the board met to discuss Cusato last fall, Denk was one of the very few attendees out of hundreds present to speak up for transgender students. She said her goal in joining the committee was to protect the district’s nondiscrimination policy.
“The hardest part for me is understanding why we’re even having this conversation,” she said, “because it is a public school.”
Missing Voices
The voices of the students and families impacted most by the pronoun debate, meanwhile, have barely been heard from at all.
The committee did hold a meeting to hear from transgender or non-binary students and families, but committee members said they declined to speak because of fear of backlash. One student submitted an anonymous letter that was read during the meeting.
“I’ve heard the phrase ‘hate the sin, not the sinner.’ That has been in no way followed in this school,” the student wrote. “When everything happened, I started hearing people I used to think were my friends talk about how they needed to get together to beat up different LGBTQIA+ students in the school.”
The student went on to say they’ve had suicidal thoughts because of the toxic environment.
“This is very real for students,” said Denk. “They need for us to develop a safe learning environment for all students. We are just people that live here. We just want to go to work and we want to go home and we want our kids to feel happy and successful in their activities.”
The committee did invite parents of transgender students from outside of the district to speak.
Sarah Rosso, executive director of the Hugh Lane Wellness Foundation, told the committee that all students need supportive and affirming adults, but having them is a life-or-death situation for transgender and non-binary students.
“We have to … assure that young people can be who they are fully and authentically,” she said.
The Trevor Project’s 2022 LGBTQ youth survey found that nearly one in five transgender and nonbinary youth attempted suicide last year.
Legal options
Weiss, the district solicitor, recommends that the board follow guidance issued by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in 2021.
That policy states that districts have a responsibility to investigate and address discrimination against students because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Weiss said that not following the guidance could jeopardize the district’s federal funding and increase legal risk.
“In my view, the rights of these students and their parents to go to school safely without intimidation and harassment is primary,” he said.
He said he was concerned that the ad hoc committee considered religious views, given that the First Amendment bars government agencies from adopting particular religious views or practices.
The board also retained the Independence Law Center for legal advice. The Harrisburg conservative legal advocacy group focuses on First Amendment freedoms including religion. Attorney Jeremy Samek told the committee that schools can promote mutual respect by accommodating students and teachers.
“Because of the likelihood that speech rights and a person’s desired means of address may conflict, one reasonable accommodation may result in the need for reasonable accommodations for others as well,” he said. Samek suggested one approach might be to have teachers simply refer to students by their last names.
The Education Law Center, a Philadelphia-based legal advocacy group, said it has received inquiries from parents in the district who were concerned about the direction the board was going in. The organization sent the district a letter urging stronger protections for LGBTQ+ students.
Kristina Moon, a senior attorney with the center, said parents report that bullying and harassment of those students are going unchecked.
“It signals that the administration, staff and community have made it very clear that students won’t be believed, that their dignity is not respected, that it is not safe for them to come forward and describe what’s happening and confidently expect a robust investigation and intervention,” she said.
What’s ahead
The committee doesn’t have a timeline for presenting its findings or recommendations to the full board.
According to meeting minutes, it will hear from mental health professionals during a future meeting. One community member on the committee, Jackie Mihalic, said she invited a transgender person who she said regretted transitioning to talk to the committee.
Mihalic chairs the Beaver County chapter of Mom’s For Liberty, a group that professes support for parental rights — a position often invoked by opponents of efforts to have students be identified as they choose.
And there’s little sign the conversation will be over any time soon.
Ten people are running for five open seats on the district’s school board in the May 16 primary. Three are incumbents, two of whom sit on the pronoun committee.
At least two candidates have said they’re running to protect the rights of parents. Meanwhile, at least one has been involved with the alumni group working to protect LGBTQ+ students.
Cronin, with the alumni group, said changes at the board level are a crucial next step.
“I feel like a lot of them aren’t taking into account how the public school system works,” they said.
Whatever decision the current board makes could be reversed when the new board members are sworn in this winter.
