The school board claims that the preteens can’t be seen on the toilets from outside the bathroom, but the article contains the line: “Additional renovations are being made to fully enclose the toilet facilities inside the restrooms…” which raises more questions. But at least the bad press that went national has prompted a reversal to this egregiously perverse anti-trans nonsense.
The Seattle Times – Pennsylvania school boards up window openings that allowed views into its gender-neutral bathrooms Oct. 4, 2024 at 10:53 am By MARK SCOLFORO – The Associated Press Oct. 4, 2024 Gelazela’s statement also warned students that they should not consider the bathroom areas outside of the toilet stalls to be private. […] Holahan said the window openings not only allowed people in the hallway to peer into the bathrooms, they also let noises from the bathrooms be heard. Burkhart, the superintendent, said the two gender neutral bathrooms have not been a particular problem for the type of misbehavior Gelazela cited. The renovations cost $8,700, Burkhart said.
Not surprisingly, of course this weirdo school board member, Matthew Gelazela, who was behind the gender neutral bathroom show window is also a covid contrarian. He minimized covid when he was running for school board — claiming that covid hadn’t killed enough people to be taken seriously. This was in October 2021, just before the huge omicron wave which was the deadliest surge for American cancer patients. He also opposed masks and vaccination. This guy also had the gall during that campaign interview to talk about “fiscally responsible education” that would “nurture” children to be free from “political programming” — and then turned around and spent $8,700.00 dollars in taxpayer money on a bathroom creep window to score culture war points over politicized gender and health issues.
There were efforts to prevent this from happening in the first place, to the extent of where a RTKL request went to the PA Office of Open Records to be adjudicated after someone requested correspondence in the South Western School District about, among other things, drafting policies about LGBTQ with regard to bathrooms. The court determined the school district wasn’t required to take any further action to provide documents at least partly because, as I understand the document, the request was considered overly broad.
The RTKL (Right To Know Law) request was originally in April 2024, and the adjudication ruled in favour of the school district in June 2024. The York Dispatch reported in May 2024 that Gelazela was the parent who filed a challenge that prompted a local book ban, and then he used the book ban to lobby officials to cut funding for the town library. The decision to put a clear glass window in a unisex bathroom for pre-teens was made at the August 2024 school board meeting.
Matthew Gelazela was voted into the school board running as a Libertarian after fear mongering about socialism in the local newspaper. There was low turnout for the school board election in 2021. He’s up for re-election in 2025, and I suspect that district will have a higher voter turnout next year.
Bathrooms with a view: Cutting windows into student restrooms is a new level of weird YORK DISPATCH EDITORIAL BOARD York Dispatch Published 9:26 a.m. ET Oct. 2, 2024 | Updated 11:22 a.m. ET Oct. 4, 2024 After a low-turnout school board election in which several far-right members joined their ranks, they hired a Christian law firm, decided to begin banning books and reopened the bathroom issue. Board President Matthew Gelazela, who was elevated to his post after previously serving as the board’s most vocal bomb-thrower, pointed to Red Lion’s discriminatory policies as something to aspire to.
It should be clear by now how all these issues are related. Public safety, public health, public libraries, healthcare, and the freedom to be who you are and love who you want, are all under attack by the same far right extremists.