By Paul Bedard
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
. . . . "We are on a trailblazing path," Susan Fleming, superintendent of Provincetown schools, said of this week's unanimous vote by the school board.
. . . . "The whole question is making gays and lesbians, whether through visuals or examples or acknowledging different family structures, ... visible," she said.
. . . . Many other school districts are fighting efforts to introduce discussions about homosexuals in either classrooms or libraries, such as those in Fairfax County, Va.
. . . . Provincetown's move, which will include having the group Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gaysspeak in kindergarten classes, comes just three months before the White House hosts a conference on hate crimes.
. . . . But while the proponents of the Provincetown measure have pushed the White House to endorse it, aides to President Clinton, who is vacationing here on Martha's Vineyard just off Cape Cod, about 40 miles from Provincetown, had no reaction.
. . . . Nonetheless, Miss Fleming and Jeannine Cristina, the homosexual mother who first pushed the initiative, said they hope to persaude other school systems to adopt their "anti-bias" proposal.
. . . . "It is truly a milestone in education," said Miss Cristina, president of the Provincetown PTA.
. . . . "I'd be so excited to have this happen across the nation. But the reality is a lot of work has to be done across the country, and hopefully Provincetown will be the model," added the mother of a 7-year-old biracial girl.
. . . . While it was initially attacked by anonymous critics in the local newspaper, no one spoke against Miss Cristina's "Provincetown Anti-Bias School and Community Project" at Tuesday night's school board meeting.
. . . . The seven-point plan broadly calls on the school system to reject bias in the curriculum of all classes.
. . . . A project statement says, "When we say anti-bias education, we are talking about equipping students, parents, teachers and the community at large with the tools needed to combat racism, sexism, ableism, classism, heterosexism and homophobia and all forms of oppression to find ways to build a society that includes all people on an equal footing."
. . . . The plan also calls on the schools to "searchfor, hire and retain a diverse staff, including sexual minorities."
. . . . Earlier this year, Miss Cristina sought a recognition of Black History Month. While she is white, her daughteris half black, the result of Miss Cristina's receiving sperm from a black man when she was artificially inseminated.
. . . . Over time, the goals of her group expanded to deal with all bias, especially against homosexuals, since nearly half of the town's parents are homosexual, as are top school officials.
. . . . Her effort won the help of town activists, including part-time high school teacher and homosexual activist John Perry Ryan.
. . . . He explained that the plan is to end the "dominance" of teaching from the point of view of "white Europeans... who are also very heterosexual, very Christian, very male."
. . . . Mr. Ryan said that the Provincetown schools beginning this year will begin using alternative curriculum and teacher's manuals that will push educators to be more understanding in dealing with biases, especially racial and sexual biases.
. . . . For example, one book for teachers titled "Rethinking Our Classrooms" includes a teaching guide headlined "What do we say when we hear 'faggot'?"
. . . . "Teaching children to be critical of oppression is teaching true morality. ... If oppression is being discussed, it is impossible to ignore lesbians and gay men as a group that faces discrimination," the manual says.
. . . . The author suggests definitions to use instead of sexual slurs. "Here are some that have seemed acceptable: 'Someone who loves someone of the same sex, but can be close to people of the opposite sex if they want to,' and 'someone who romantically loves someone of the same sex.'"
. . . . Mr. Ryan said the changes could come quickly. "The library will be one of the short-term good starting places. ... We will look for what voices are missing and who has been left out."
. . . . Miss Fleming noted that it is appropriate for the school system to be the laboratory for social change.
. . . . "Schools often play out what's happening in the community. ... We are going to be a change agent."
. . . . She said that in addition to having kindergarten students hear from the parents of homosexuals, students in grades 1 through 3 will be told that not all families contain a mother and father.
. . . . "It's just language. It's being able to talk about family structures other than heterosexuals," she said.
PROVINCETOWN COMMUNIQUE
The Provincetown Anti-Bias School and Community Project won unanimous support this week for its seven-point anti-bias agenda.
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CAPE COD TIMES, August 22, 1997
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P'town cheers bias training
The school committee defends a sensitivity training program for its teachers.
By K.C. MYERS, STAFF WRITER
PROVINCETOWN - The school committee last night re-affirmed its support for the Provincetown Anti-Bias School and Community Project, temporarily dousing the third community disagreement this summer over issues of diversity.
A crowd of 75 attended a school committee meeting last night, mostly to defend a project that would train teachers to be sensitive to both genders, sexual orientations, races, and classes in their lessons.
In the past month similar battles have been fought over censorship at the Art Association and the perceived exclusiveness of a gay and lesbian holiday stroll.
"We all come to school every day with a bias," School Superintendent Susan Fleming said last night.
In schools nationwide, the "dominant norm" taught in classrooms is white, educated, middle or upper middle class, heterosexual able-bodied, and male, she said.
"This program is an invitation to put glasses on and make sure other things besides the dominant norm will be dealt with equitably," said Fleming.
She received loud applause.
"I'm proud to live in a town that would take this on, because every other town I've been in blocks it," said Brenda Haywood, an African American.
But parts of the program were not as popular last month.
The school committee appoved the plan in July, but then later parents and teachers complained and wanted to re-open the issue, which was done last night, said Jeannine Cristina, president of the Provincetown PTA and co-chair of the Anti-Bias Working Group.
Cristina is a lesbian whose daughter Hannah, 7, is bi-racial as the result of an African American sperm bank donor. Cristina said she formed the anti-bias working group after a "homophobic and racist" incident a few years ago in the school. More recently, she notice there was no school-wide exhibit honoring Black History Month.
Last night the police chief, town manager and a Catholic priest all spoke in support of the plan.
Police Chief Robert Anthony quoted Town Manager Keith Bergman: "Haters watch what leaders do."
No one objected to the plan last night, although school committee member Charles "Stormy" Mayo questioned how the plan would be implemented.
School committee member Billy Rogers said he was at first afraid the anti-bias group may have a "hidden agenda," but that ended after he spoke for hours with some of the members.
"I learned they are very caring and they have no hidden agendas," he said.
Such lessons come up in Provincetown outside the classroom.
Because of its large gay and lesbian population, Provincetown is a "social laboratory" for tensions between the heterosexual and gay communities, said John Dreyer, co-chairperson of the Provincetown host committee for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Indeed, last week Selectman Mary-Jo Avellar turned a selectmen's meeting into a furious discourse on alternative lifestyles. She protested the creation of "Holly Folly," the first annual gay and lesbian holiday festival to be organized by the Women Innkeepers Association and the Provincetown Business Guild.
Both organizations promote gay tourism. This holiday season they propose spending $2,500 in revenue taken from hotel room exise taxes to promote a gay holiday stroll in December as a way to bring in tourists in the winter.
The selectmen, except Avellar, voted for it as an economic move,since so many of Provincetown's tourists are gay, said Dreyer.
Avellar maintains the event promotes exclusiveness.
"I wouldn't want to live in a community where everyone is like me," said Avellar. "But I don't think we should put our eggs in one basket either."
She said Provincetown "has an opportunity and an obligation" to educate tourists from all over the country about alternative lifestyles. But someone from Kansas may decide to go elsewhere for a holiday stroll if they think Provincetown's is only for gay people.
Dreyer, who is a board member for the national task force, said, "I don't think a gay and lesbian stroll needs to be any more exclusive than the Portuguese Festival."
Two weeks ago the lifestyle tensions sparked at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum when a long-time board member Connie Black removed her art work in protest of a photograph of a male nude masturbating. At the time she said the picture was violent and should be kept away from children. She said the artist who hung that particular exhibit was pushing the agenda of ACT-UP, an AIDS and gay activist group, into the museum.
Dreyer said it interested him that she automatically linked a picture of one man alone as homosexual.
"He could have been looking at a Playboy," he said.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a nonprofit advocay group, will be addressing these issues as well as national topics in a forum Friday. Panelists such as the comedian Kate Clinton will talk about the "Ellen" television program and the Andrew Cunanan murder spree.
(NOTE from the sender: The population of Provincetown is heavily of Portuguese extraction and the Portuguese Festival is an annual event. It attracts multitudes of people of all ethnicities. Many, if not most, of the people of Portuguese descent who live in Provincetown are of the Catholic faith, and so the voice of a priest in favor of the program would be likely to have meaning for them.
BOSTON GLOBE, August 22, 1997
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Antibias push defended in Provincetown
Officials say school effort is about discrimination, not gay agenda
By Jason Pring, Globe Correspondent
Provincetown School Committee members and other town officials yesterday defended a proposed antibias curriculum, which has gained national attention because some say it promotes homosexuality.
Officials said the effort to promote diversity grew from concerns about racism, not a gay and lesbian agenda.
''We've had TV reporters here all day,'' Keith Bergman, Provincetown town manager, said in a telephone interview yesterday.
''I guess this reaction is the result of the Washington Times article about us, which is unrecognizable from anything that Provincetown is working on,'' Bergman said.
Bergman was referring to a front page story that ran in the Washington Times yesterday, which reported that the Provinctown School Committee had voted to teach preschoolers about homosexual lifestyles. What the School Committee approved was ''support'' for an undefined antibias curriculum.
''Unfortunately the media has zeroed in on issues dealing with sexual orientation, when the antibias program is about equipping the community with tools to fight racism, sexism, classism, bias against people with disabilities, and homophobia,'' Bergman said.
In recent years, Provincetown has been known as a gay community, where displays of affection between same-sex couples are common.
The grass-roots antibias initiative began when Jeannine Cristina, president of the Provincetown PTA and co-chairwoman of the antibias working group, noticed that there was no schoolwide recognition of Black History Month.
Cristina and other PTA members sent a letter to the superintendent and principal of the elementary school, and were invited to a meeting in early March.
''Those meetings evolved, and the members formed the Provincetown Anti-Bias School and Community Project,'' said Steve Roderick, cairman of the Provincetown School Committee. ''They proposed the antibias curriculum.''
''We're not the first district to do this. Cambridge and Newton have had antibias curriculums for awhile, and certainly we can follow the lead of other districts,'' Roderick added.
School Committee members say that including different points of view when teaching any given topic will diminish bias.
Inviting grandparents, for example, to tell stories about their own lives to children in school is one way to have people of different backgrounds express their points of view, Cristina said.
''Another way of teaching antibias perspective is to pick games and toys that reflect different cultures, so children learn to think critically about universally held assumptions that may contribute to bias,'' Cristina said.
''The nuts and bolts of the new curriculum is still being developed and the support shown by the School Committee is the first step in moving forward,'' Cristina said.
Cristina said that the School Committee will use programs established by the Massachusetts Department of Education that are intended to reduce bias against minorities in the school system.
Last updated 8/26/97 by Jean Richter, richter@eecs.Berkeley.EDU