South Western’s elected school board is making some strange decisions.
For the last two years, they’ve fixated on which bathrooms LGBTQ+ kids use. In 2023, officials in this Hanover-area district played musical chairs with school bathrooms in a misguided attempt to appease the loudest bigots among them — ending up with five different types of bathrooms.
After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.
Now, upon the advice of that law firm — the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center — the board approved spending $8,700 to cut windows so passersby can look into the so-called “gender-identity” student bathrooms.
It’s to ensure people remain on the outside and excluded.
If someone’s preferred bathroom in the men’s room, but they are forbidden from using it, they have a special bathroom to use. However we can’t have them privately using a bathroom. We have to put them on display. EVERYONE needs to know they are different. The goal is to exclude, the goal is to make them feel different, the goal is hate. It’s disgusting.
As students, hopefully, they just start to use the bathroom normally. If all students use it, then it’s not weird. Now that’s unfair to push on middle school students. But it’s an option.