Karen Poznanski, a member of Murrieta Educators Association and 12-year public school teacher, spoke at the September 2023 Murrieta Valley Unified School District board meeting in response to comments made by President Paul Diffley at the previous month’s meeting. In speaking about MVUSD’s forced outing policy, which requires schools to inform parents if a student appears to identify as transgender or gender-nonconforming, Diffley stated, among other comments, “I agree that there are some parents who may beat their kids, spank their kids, ignore their kids…. Yes, there are going to be a couple of parents that ‘explode’, I understand that. There are parents that will explode for lots of different things. ‘You didn’t make the baseball team? Whack!’…I understand that.”

Karen Poznanski

Mr. Diffley you stated “Entering into a particular ‘mood’ where the child can bury what he or she is and go through that process can be dangerous because they can be referred to other agencies without the parents ever knowing it, and then boom…. the parents have no control.”

I implore you to reevaluate your perception of what I spend my contracted hours doing in my classroom. On any given day, I am lucky if all my students write their name on their paper. I make as much use of my minimal time and abysmal budget as I can to teach struggling middle school students how to read and write a proper paragraph. Your insinuation that I have the time, resources or desire to “refer children to outside agencies” for medical guidance or treatment is a statement that defies logic or fact. You possess a glaring lack of understanding of what actually goes on in the classroom and have no place making statements that accuse teachers of such actions because they are absolutely false.

“When you speak about a lack of trust between parents and teachers, it is from your inaccurate and fallacious statements that such distrust is sown. You are manufacturing this chaos.”

“When you speak about a lack of trust between parents and teachers, it is from your inaccurate and fallacious statements that such distrust is sown. You are manufacturing this chaos.”

When you speak about a lack of trust between parents and teachers, it is from your inaccurate and fallacious statements that such distrust is sown. You are manufacturing this chaos, and feeding into a dangerously misinformed moral panic that only serves to distract from real issues.

Furthermore, when confronted about the risk of harm that would fall upon certain queer students if outed to homophobic or transphobic households, you said you agreed and understood why that would happen. Mr. Diffley, as board president you are the purveyor of safety in our schools. I would hope that you would be appalled at any child being physically harmed for any reason. As a parent, I am disgusted by your comments. As an employee, I am ashamed that someone I work for, who supposedly shares my obligation to student safety and success, would ever make such a comment. Up until August 10, you had always done the right thing by supporting students and teachers as a productive board member. But [now], long after your tenure, you will be remembered not for the years of good you did, but for the utter negligence and abandonment of decency you committed when those words came out of your mouth.

I want to finish on a positive, by sharing with you a success story. In 2021, you had a student graduate from MVUSD with a 4.4 overall GPA, president of several accoladed programs like National Honor Society, Link Crew and the dramatic arts. They graduated in the top 10 of their class, and thus their picture hung in the school’s front office for a year. As board president, you likely signed one of this student’s awards when they were named Student of the Month, a district-level academic honor. This student went on to attend UCLA, the #1 public university in the U.S., and is set to graduate early with a 4-year degree and a minor. This student exemplifies what the board would highlight as a successful product of MVUSD’s outstanding teachers, academic opportunities and extracurricular programs. This student is also gay
and nonbinary. I know this because this student is my own child. Their identity and their success are not mutually exclusive, nor are they successful in spite of their identity; rather, their identity is just another human value that makes them strong, unique and empathetic. When you isolate queer students as the “other,” or as a political mob, or as confused and misguided, you fail to represent the students you are supposed to be serving. Your queer students are also your top students, whether you like it or not.

You use their stories for your benefit, when their successes boost the value of your district, yet you just as easily abuse their humanity when it serves your discriminatory agenda.

They will be the ones running for office and enacting laws to undo the harm you have sown in this room. They will replace you and restore fairness and decency to our educational system. They have learned exactly what we teach them: to stand up and fight for what is right. And Mr. Diffley, their fight has just begun.

Read our story “Defending Our Schools and Students,”  which looks at how educators are fighting to protect students from politicized policies that impact learning and safety.