Another Pride Month Passes With No Action:
Steve Dain Field Turns Into a Field of Dreams For Seekers of Social Justice
School Board Says NO to Naming Athletic Field for Fired
Transgender Teacher
The Emery Unified School District Board of Trustees, desiring to stop a growing community movement to name the athletic field at the Center of Community Life school campus for its deceased transgender teacher, Steve Dain, engaged in a ‘catch and kill’ program to neutralize the community's action the Tattler has learned. The community quest to posthumously honor the teacher the district fired for “immorality” in the 1970s, was siloed by the Board via use of a bogus committee set up ostensibly by the Board to “investigate” naming the field after Mr Dain. The so called Naming Committee has not met even once since its chartering in April 2021 and the Board refuses to say if it will ever meet.
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| Emery School Board Member John Van Geffen Not fond of 'Steve Dain Field' or Steve Dain anything for that matter, he says there's no reason for the Naming Committee to meet. His Board colleagues agree. |
The Board was caught off guard in 2019 amid a rising community groundswell to name the gym at the school campus after Mr Dain who was a popular PE teacher at Emery before he was fired for transitioning to a man in 1976. All but one Board member, the president, were against Steve Dain Gymnasium and countering the groundswell, the Board threw the decision over to parents at Emery who refused to name the gym after a transgender person, naming it instead after a non-trans retired PE teacher. The parents gave the Board cover to anoint the 'Elio Abrami Gym' instead of Steve Dain Gym.
The cynicism of that Board move may have gotten them out of the publicly uncomfortable position of having to go on record as having voted NO to Steve Dain Gym but it came at a cost. Board president Barbara Inch, the only supporter of Mr Dain on the Board, resigned from the Board in protest. Watching from the sidelines and alarmed by the Board's Abrami gambit, the City Council responded by renaming 47th Street, the street address of the School District, 'Steve Dain Drive' in March 2021 by fiat.
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| The result of the first use of catch and kill by the Board (to stop the Steve Dain Gym movement). |
‘Catch and kill’ is a term used by right wing media to stop stories they don’t like. Readers may remember how David Pecker, the CEO of the National Inquirer, a strong supporter of candidate Donald Trump in 2016, paid Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal $150,000 for exclusive publishing rights to her story about her affair with Trump. After getting her assurance she would not tell her story to any other media before the 2016 election, the National Inquirer then refused to post the story they paid for, thereby killing it to help Trump's election chances. It was a tactic useful to Donald Trump then and to the School Board at Emery now.
In 2021, the Board said its new Naming Committee would meet on a strictly ad hoc basis, meaning only when there’s a ‘need’ to meet. Not seeing a need to meet after assuring the social justice seeking community the issue would be taken up by the Committee, the community’s Steve Dain Field request has been quietly erased by the Board.
Board member John Van Geffen, whom the Board appointed as the Naming Committee Chair, was contacted for this story but he refused to comment.
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| Steve Dain Field (except for anti-trans bigotry at Emery) Community members who want to see the arc of the moral universe bend toward justice will have to wait longer for the School Board at Emery Unified School District to imagine equality. |
