Mission Viejo Students Ask to Form Gay Student Support Club

Two students at Mission Viejo High School have submitted a proposal to start a gay support group on campus.

But in this case, the students will run into an obstacle unusual among the county’s public schools: a district policy that prohibits all clubs that are not related to the classroom.

“It’s not going to get out of the starting gate,” Supt. Peter Hartman said.

The move at Mission Viejo is the furthest any students in Orange County have gone to forming a gay-student support group since a federal judge ruled last week that El Modena High in Orange must allow the Gay-Straight Alliance to meet on campus.

Luis Torres, co-chairman of the Orange County chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said he had received inquiries from students at four or five high schools besides Mission Viejo about starting gay support clubs, including Capistrano Valley in Mission Viejo and Foothill in Tustin.

Torres, whose group gives programs in schools on tolerance toward gays and offers advice to gay support clubs, said he thinks students are waiting to see how things play out at El Modena before they move forward. Some students worry about retaliation from school administrators, he said; others would first have to tell their families they are gay.

At least two Orange County high schools, Fountain Valley and Los Alamitos, already have such clubs.

When Orange Unified School District trustees banned the El Modena group from campus, they said they feared the club would touch on sex-education issues that are part of the district’s curriculum. The club’s founders sued under a law that says that if a school allows one extracurricular club, such as a Christian club, it must allow all such groups.

The Saddleback Valley Unified school system, which oversees the Mission Viejo campus, decided 15 years ago on an opposite approach. Resisting the push to get schools to open their classrooms to religious clubs, the district banned all extracurricular clubs. Thus, Spanish clubs are allowed; Christian clubs are not.

Mission Viejo junior Jason Fasi said his idea for a gay support club received a mostly positive reaction from students, 100 of whom signed a petition supporting the group.

“If there’s a negative reaction, that’s good,” he said. “All it will do is show me exactly why we need a club.”

He was undeterred by the district rule. “I don’t think they understand the implications of this policy,” he said. “It seems they’re allowing the policy to choose which clubs can go through. I guess my response would be, we’ll see.”

Fasi said he moved forward with his petition after hearing about events at El Modena, but that those were a small part of his decision. The bigger push, he said, came from the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming student killed because of his sexual orientation, and the enactment of a state law that prohibits discrimination against or harassment of students because of sexual orientation.

“The Matthew Shepard thing really affected me,” Fasi said. “Things happen to [gay teens] that don’t happen to heterosexual teens.”

Not surprisingly, the Mission Viejo move was denounced in some quarters.

Wiley Drake, pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, who was an outspoken critic of the El Modena gay support club and attended the court sessions on the lawsuit, said the push for a Mission Viejo club doesn’t surprise him.

“I expected to see a rash of these because it’s just something kids want to get on bandwagon and run with,” he said.

In contrast to Orange, some school districts across the nation have encouraged such clubs. The Boston public schools last month decided to hire a coordinator to ensure there are gay support clubs in its 21 high schools.