On April 8, Aragon’s GSA club introduced the first collaboration with the Aragon freshmen health course during its unit on sexuality. The project is titled the “Health x GSA Program.”
The GSA presentation consisted of a variety of topics. English teacher and GSA advisor Vince Bravo says, “The presentation covered information about gender identity and sexuality, and it discussed the nuts and bolts of behaviors on a high school campus. It addressed a few hypotheticals about knowing information about somebody and not outing them.”
Health teacher Barbara Beaumont first introduced the idea of a collaboration. She says, “I think it’s a great idea that it’s their peers, their school, and it’s a club on campus. So they know what club is on their campus to help them if they’re having issues and [if] they’re getting information straight from their peers about the issues that this group may face.”
Beaumont adds that the idea for the collaboration was influenced by other schools as well. She says, “I asked GSA because I meet with all the health teachers in the district at least once a month, if not twice, and we talk about issues on campus, the healthy kids survey, what are the outcomes of it, what we’re doing in our classes, and what are some new things we can do. So last year, one of the teachers at the other campus said, ‘we had GSA come in and it was awesome.’”
While in the past, GSA has presented health awareness programs to Borel Middle School, Bravo says, “We decided rather than putting a whole bunch of energy into finding the right place to connect with Borel that we could just see if Ms. Beaumont would be interested in Beaumont would be interested in allowing us to come do it here.”
Beaumont introduces the topic to her student during two units. She says, “I teach that unit in relationships as well as in the sex ed [course]. Then, I show the movie, Straight Laced, which deals with some of those issues, and I also show this movie, Bullied.”
GSA President and junior Anders Zhou says, “We [had] people coming from GSA and they [hosted] a LGBTQ+ awareness seminar for these freshmen because we do feel like it’s important for freshmen in health classes to understand how important LGBTQ+ issues are and how to be sensitive to these topics.”
Freshman Jason Palmiery enjoys the friendly environement GSA offers. He says, “[GSA club] is really like a place you want to be in if you’re not gay or anything, you can still go there just have fun, be with friends, and you can learn more things from them.”
Palmiery continues, “They really showed me how people aren’t just a cover of a book and how you actually have to read the book to understand more about how they are.”
Beaumont describes these topics in greater detail. She says, “Straightlaced talks about relationships and who we are and what we stand for and how this issues may have affected us in our life about being accepted or not accepted. And this goes into being bullied, and awareness, and how you can be an advocate and how to stand up for other people.”
Freshman Maria Sell concludes,“I thought all the presenters did a really good job because they handled the questions really well and they definitely explained gender and sexuality to everyone so that we can be polite and understanding and understand pronouns and how people may portray themselves.”
