The refreshing charm of Fiesta Hispanica

While other schools abandon education fundamentals, my kids are learning Spanish, math, and reading (in two languages), while singing and dancing in gendered costumes.

I spent Friday morning at my kids’ elementary school for Fiesta Hispanica — a Cinco De Mayo celebration. My kindergartner and 2nd grader attend a language immersion public charter school in Denver. They are both in the Spanish program.

It was so lovely and normal to sit in the school’s auditorium shoulder to shoulder with other parents, watching our children dance and sing, a reminder that these small moments are what make a child’s life — and a parent’s — special.

I also took note of the costumes. The girls wore dresses and flowers in their hair. This is my daughter:

And here’s one of the kindergarten classes:

The boys wore ties and swung the girls around in partner dances.

Nowhere in the multitude of invitations was there any use of the neologism Latinx. I suspect the majority native Spanish speaking staff rejects the term as irrelevant in the inherently gendered language. They wouldn’t be alone in this. Polls show that the term is highly unpopular, with only 2-3% of Hispanics embracing it. How would you even pronounce it in Spanish?

I also suspect that if any child objected to the gendered outfits, they would have been permitted to dress differently. But none did, apparently. You can argue they felt the pressure of the gender binary and so they acquiesced. Or maybe they just didn’t think about it all that much, as I would argue is appropriate for 6 and 7 year olds. They were celebrating the dances and songs of various Latin American countries, not waging a war against the oppressive gender binary.

At this school, the “target language” — both Mandarin and Spanish are offered — is the language of instruction in the classroom. Approximately 80% of the school day is taught in the target language by the time the kids reach 3rd grade. The school promises that after 2-3 years in an immersion program the students will demonstrate language proficiency on par with that of native speakers of the same age. And of course, many of the students are native Spanish or Mandarin speakers so there are students with a range of diverse backgrounds.

We moved to Denver, in part, because this public school accepted us without question in February 2021, while schools in San Francisco remained persistently closed due to covid. Our kids were in Spanish immersion programs in San Francisco (virtual, at this point) so this seemed like the perfect fit.

My husband grew up bilingual (speaking Hebrew and English) and learned Italian as an adult. It was important to us that our children step outside of a narrow view of the world, reinforced through a singular cultural reference point. Learning another language can facilitate this. As Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini said: "A different language is a different vision of life.”

We called the school they now attend in February 2021, and they said come on over. So we did. I can only assume there were some in-person slots open as some families kept their kids in virtual instruction. And so despite implied accusations from Twitter trolls that we somehow paid our way in (I’m not sure how you pay your way into a public school), we didn’t. This anonymous tweet was liked by my brother, which is the only reason it popped up in my feed. (Fun family dynamics over here.) It’s always nice when a member of your family assumes you’re bribing education officials with no evidence of such corruption.

I could not be happier that we made the choice to move to Denver and put our kids in this particular school, as San Francisco seems to get crazier and crazier by the minute. Besides the rising rate of property crimes, businesses like Whole Foods, Nordstrom and Walgreens are shuttering by choice due to theft and assaults on their retail associates. There are high profile violent crime incidents like the murder of Cash App founder Bob Lee; there is rampant homelessness and open air drug use; and the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) continues to fight about whether or not it is racist to teach algebra in middle school. All of this chaos, yet San Francisco remains one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S.

A uni-party city in a uni-party state, San Francisco’s “harm reduction” policies (for drug addiction, homelessness, crime, covid — you name it) are ruining the place. And the San Francisco Democrats seem to be eating themselves from the inside. No one is pure enough.

This piece ran on May 6 in the San Francisco Chronicle.

A woman named Cyn Wang is featured in the piece. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is married to a woman from Mexico, she sends her daughter to public school and she worked in the Obama administration. Furthermore, she voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 presidential primary and Biden in the general election.

No matter. Wang and other parents asked the San Francisco Democratic Party to charter their group — the Westside Democratic Club — aimed at registering more people to vote in next year’s elections. They were denied the requested charter. Why? Here’s what Heather Knight wrote in the SF Chronicle:

“They [the Westside Democratic Club] invited Supervisor Joel Engardio, a leader in last year’s school board recall movement, to an event! Their members include some well-off families! They say they’re Democrats, but what if they’re actually closeted Republicans? What if Republicans are funneling dark money into their bank accounts? In the most out-of-nowhere chatter of all, some party members speculated that the club co-founders are racist.”

Even Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones — the lefty publication with roots in the labor movement — saw fit to call this nonsense “bullshit.”

Jeffery went on:

Whoa! She’s calling for a “conservative counterweight” to bring back some semblance of sanity! In San Francisco!

No one, and I mean no one, is woke enough. Tenant activist Jordan Davis rejected the club’s charter with this: “Family is a dog-whistle for Republican.” He further objected citing that the club would be a funnel for “Republican dark money." This is some grade-A level bullshit. In a rare instance, I’m going to agree with Jeffery.

The Mean Girls style governance in San Francisco these days means that if you have a family you’re not welcome. (Not surprising really, given that San Francisco has the lowest percentage of children of any city in the U.S., and that was true even before covid.)

Do these people realize what they are doing? They are turning the “big tent” party from the 1930s to the 1960s into the tiny tent (read: soon to be obsolete?) S.F. version of the Democratic Party today. With California often viewed as a progressive policy leader — a shining example of what to do, not what not to do — one has to wonder if these insane policies might be coming soon to a village near you?

Perhaps the fact that Knight and Jeffery seem to mock the San Francisco Democrats relentlessly because of this absurdity is cause for hope. Maybe one day everyone will be cancelled in San Francisco and they can start over from a place of rationality. Or maybe not. Perhaps the drawbridge will have been pulled up for all, except those suffering and dying in the streets and those folks will be left to suffer without any pretense of intervention once and for all. Not even the pretense of help known as “harm reduction.”

Perhaps residents will just continue leaving in droves. San Francisco has more people exiting than any other metropolitan area in the U.S. Close to 7% of residents left the city from 2020-2021. If this continues, at some point, inevitably, there will be like three people left to govern the chaos and emptiness as they see fit.

All of this is to say — after having endured my own accusations of “dark money” and “racism” and you don’t care about kids you’re a right wing Koch-funded astro-turfer, I’m happy to be in Denver. That isn’t to say there aren’t issues here. But believe me when I tell you they are NOTHING compared to San Francisco.

In Denver, there is a growing issue with homelessness. There is a fentanyl problem. Car thefts are higher in Colorado than anywhere else in the country. And there is a debate about all the culture war stuff in classrooms.

In January 2020, Denver Public Schools (DPS) adopted “The Board of Education Resolution on Inclusion for Our LGBTQIA+ Employees, Students and Community Members.”

Some of the tenets are:

• HR updated systems so that students and staff could select gender identity options that more accurately reflected who they were. 

• School administrations recommitted themselves to having Gender and Sexuality Alliance clubs in elementary, middle and high schools.

• Schools recommitted to respecting each student’s gender identity and sexual orientation even if that student’s family did not. 

Though at the moment, there seems to be soft agreement not to bring explicit conversation around the subjects of gender and sexuality into the classroom until the 4th grade. In April 2022, Steve Durham, vice chairman of the Colorado Board of Education said:

“The recommendation at the moment is to omit references to gender identity from . . . K-3.”

This, by the way, is the exact policy in Florida’s much maligned Parental Rights in Education Act (HB 1557), or as the ideologues prefer to call it the “Don’t Say Gay Bill.”

Look, we have our very own Gabriela López (the former VP of the San Francisco Board of Education, recalled for focusing on renaming closed schools during covid, rather than opening them) here in Denver. His name is Auon’tai M. Anderson.

He said this earlier this year:

And he says all kinds of other crazy stuff. Oh plus there are allegations of sexual assault. Of students. The most serious claims were not substantiated but it was confirmed that he had inappropriate, flirtatious social media contact with a 16-year- old Denver Public School (DPS) student while he was a sitting a board member (he still is) and made intimidating social media posts directed at witnesses. But the Dems keep putting him forward for school board and I expect we’ll see him running for higher office soon. He’s only 24 years old.

I’ve been wondering when my kids were going to come home and talk about all the gender stuff, and how they’d do it. I’ve been preparing for the moment when my 6-year-old daughter might come home and pronounce: “Mom, girls and boys can have penises!” I’ve thought about what I’d say. (My gut says to respond simply with “No, they can’t.) But they haven’t come home yet with any of this.

And attending this festival made me think it might not happen, at least not any time soon.

The Fiesta Hispanica performance was utterly gendered. And not just in terms of the costumes the kids wore. But in terms of the roles they’d played in the performances. It was flouncy skirts for the girls, pants and ties and twirling of the girls for the boys.

I’m left wondering, does DPS know that this school is doing this? I suspect the focus on learning a language (in addition to emphasizing reading and math basics), crowds out inserting ideology into education. And perhaps the fact that Spanish is an inherently gendered language makes it impossible to de-gender everything. And I’m grateful.

If so, how do we prevent DPS from finding out this school is “going rogue” — abandoning the politicized social and emotional learning (SEL) so in vogue — long enough so that my kids can learn Spanish and enjoy a woke-free education at least until middle school? I’m not sure. But I’ll take what I can get for now. Until DPS finds out what is going on in this language immersion elementary school, Viva Fiesta Hispanica!