A high school in Huntington Beach, California has found itself in the spotlight after a video has gone viral of students reacting to a Pride video shown during a math class.
Students at Edison High School were threatened with detention for shouting and objecting to the video which showed two girls intimately touching.
Teacher Tiffany Clark, tried to quiet the students who were acting unruly while the short video was shown.
“I’ll warn you guys now if you’re going to be inappropriate, I will have supervision down and give all of you a Saturday school for next year,” she told students who swiftly became silent.
The video in question was a segment of the student-produced Bolt TV, a monthly news report produced by Edison students, according to a comment on Twitter in response to the video by a parent who had a child that previously attended the school.
Staff from Edison High School and its school district, Huntington Beach Union High School District, did not return requests for comment.
Diana Carey, president of the school district, however, did make a statement about the issue during a June 13 school board meeting.
“The Huntington Beach Union High School District is committed to fostering a safe and respectful environment where every student is provided an opportunity to learn. With the recent circulation on social media of a video in an Edison High School classroom, we have received comments and are reviewing our processes for developing and circulating materials to students,” she said.
Some students and parents also spoke during public comment about the viral video.
“For people who don’t know, this video was created by students for students as a regular occurrence at Edison High School,” one student said.
He said the video wasn’t “some state-mandated [attempt] trying to turn your kids gay,” but instead were students recognizing their peers.
One parent said he pulled his children out of local public schools because of the teaching of “comprehensive sexual education.”
“We’ve been battling this for a long time, and now it’s come to surface. ... Everybody’s onto this, including the kids. That’s indoctrination that’s going on in your schools,” he said.
A sophomore at Fountain Valley High School also made comments regarding the video, which he said featured content that offended students and parents alike.
“That said video containing much sexual content was met with significant outcry, much of it rightfully so,” he said.
He said while some argue the video was produced by students, the school is still at fault for allowing it in classrooms.
“The origin of the video does not matter, the content of it does. ... This is not a criticism of the LGBTQ community, rather this is a criticism of the sexual content that is being shown in our classrooms,” he said.
Mayor Pro Tem of Huntington Beach Gracey Van Der Mark also made comments at the meeting.
“What I saw in that video were a lot of students confined to a classroom being shown a video they were clearly uncomfortable with. ... Rather than listen to the students, the teacher threatened them with supervision and to give them a detention class the following year,” she said.
Van Der Mark also said the students reacting to the video weren’t the ones being inappropriate.
“At no time was the teacher concerned with the student’s visceral reactions as they watched the video clips of couples in intimate positions and poses,” she said.
