This fall, a pair of middle school teachers from the Salinas Valley traveled to Palm Springs for the California Teachers Association’s annual LGBTQ+ Issues Conference. There, on a Saturday afternoon, Lori Caldeira and Kelly Baraki spoke to a few dozen people about a subject they knew well: the difficulty of running a GSA, or gay-straight alliance, in a socially conservative community.
Speaking about recruiting students, Baraki said, “When we were doing our virtual learning — we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing schoolwork. One of them was Googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”
Shortly after the October conference, a surreptitious recording of the presentation was handed to a conservative writer known for asserting that transgender adolescents are part of a dangerous “craze.” She published a story Nov. 18 headlined “How Activist Teachers Recruit Kids,” criticizing Caldeira and Baraki for actions they had seen as proper: keeping club members’ identities confidential from parents and finding a couple of potential members by viewing their online activity in class.
One day after the article came out, Caldeira and Baraki’s presentation on the difficulties of running their GSA would prove prophetic: Leaders of the Spreckels Union School District suspended the club. Four days later, the district opened an investigation and placed the teachers on administrative leave.
The controversy has roiled the small district south of Salinas and east of Monterey, alarming advocates for LGBTQ youth and marking one of a number of recent incidents in which influential conservative voices have forced the hands of local officials.
The episode raises broader questions about educators’ growing ability to monitor what students do online, which accelerated during the pandemic, and about what responsibility schools have to provide safe spaces such as gay-straight alliances for LGBTQ students who may not have support from peers and parents.
Caldeira and Baraki, who said they have received violent threats since the story went viral in some circles, said they are worried about their students. Both teach at Buena Vista Middle School, which has an enrollment of around 360.
“Can you imagine? Seriously, we have kids in our club right now who are out at school, (but) they’re not out at home. The only two teachers that they have ever spoken to have been taken away,” said Caldeira, her voice and hands shaking as she spoke at a Monterey coffee shop in her first interview since the district suspended the GSA. “I’m sure they’re terrified, because where are they going to go, and who are they going to talk to, you know?”
Caldeira said the club — called UBU (You Be You) — had for more than six years allowed students to ask questions they might not be ready to bring up with their families.
“Our conversations were always student-led, which is why they frequently surrounded LGBTQ topics. Because the kids have questions,” she said. “Their parents think we start that conversation, but we don’t. TikTok starts it, Snapchat starts it, Instagram starts it or their classmates start it, and then we just try to answer the questions as honestly and fairly as we can.”
The district has launched a third-party investigation into the actions of the teachers. Officials declined to be interviewed by The Chronicle, but Superintendent Eric Tarallo, school board President Steve McDougall and Buena Vista Principal Kate Pagaran released a statement Nov. 19 apologizing to parents, while promising that the district would exert tighter control over student clubs and bar teachers from “monitoring students’ online activity for any non-academic purposes.”
At the school board’s Dec. 15 meeting, member Michael Scott said, “I am hopeful a third-party investigation will provide a clearer picture of the circumstances surrounding the UBU club and how it was run, that any subsequent action should be responsive to the values, beliefs and priorities of the Spreckels community.”
The Palm Springs presentation by Caldeira and Baraki was similar in many ways to talks they’ve given for four or five years, they said. For an hour and 15 minutes, they spoke informally to about 40 people.
Caldeira, who in 2017 won an award for her work with special-needs students, said she requested the presentation not be recorded. “We do deal with middle schoolers,” she said, “and it can be sensitive content at times.”
But the secret audio made its way to Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, which has been criticized as unscientific and inflammatory. On Nov. 18, she published the first of four stories about the Spreckels teachers on her Substack newsletter, the Truth Fairy, where she has argued that transgender women “are not women” and that gender-affirming school policies abuse parents’ rights.
Shrier focused heavily on Baraki’s comment about seeing a student’s Google search for “Trans Day of Visibility,” characterizing this as “surveillance” of potential recruits into the GSA.
The Chronicle could not obtain audio of the presentation, but Caldeira confirmed she and Baraki had been accurately quoted by Shrier. However, she said many of the comments were misconstrued and taken out of context….
The above comes from a Dec. 28 story in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The tone deafness is *deafening*. The problem of pederasty and grooming and the enabling of sexual predators in the public schools that has been exposed more and more (even Abigail Shrier’s work aside) will dwarf what happened in the American Catholic Church.
And clandestine digging out of the ideology isn’t even necessary. It’s right out in the open for anyone to see. What is necessary are courageous parents to stand in the gap for their children against these maniacs. The more these parents are persecuted and attacked, the more support that will come…so….bring it on. These people are so ignorant about what unstable ground they’re standing on, it’s pathetic.
What these teachers did was inappropriate because of the way they stalked the students, but having an LGBT group is hardly enabling pederasty and grooming of pederasty and sexual predators.
I came you a thumbs up before reading the whole article and should not have clicked up or down as I am not sure what happens in public schools is lesser than what happens in American Catholic Church. There are predators in all religions, and of no religion, so I would say it is hard to tell. When anyone tells a child or teen that the homosexual lifestyle is all right without telling them about the dangers of that lifestyle and that it is wrong, they are suspect as far as I am concerned. They might say it out of misguided compassion, but it is wrong none the less. Same with transgenderism and other vices.
How many snaps of the camera did it take for them to get just the right pouty face look on the teacher? I’m sick of these progressives indoctrinating kids with CRT, LGBTQWERTY, global warming, Communist, socialist, covid lockdown crap. Fire every single one of them. They are predators, not educators.
Let’s not teach anything inappropriate to the kids and let’s only teach age-appropriate subject matter. That was easy! We know, however, that the devil is in the details. Is CRT taught in public schools? In some graduate classes and law school, maybe but I doubt it is taught in most schools. Perhaps we need a good definition of what CRT is, rather than letting it be a bugaboo for anything we don’t want taught about our history. You can’t teach US history clearly without talking about the civil rights movement, about lynching, about the Trail of Tears, about taking land from Native Americans, etc. We can’t teach about democracy without teaching about the fallacy of communism and socialism. The problem, of course, is that we don’t all have the same definition of communism and socialism. So, I agree with you. Let’s stop teaching junk stuff and start teaching the truth about our history. Let’s teach the kids why we are the best country in the world, but admit that there are some warts too.
Bob One it was proven that CRT is being taught in schools as part of the ideology of the Left. Why is it Bob One we can all have the same definition of Nazism, but not communism, answer: the Left is in operational control of the Culture.