School’s ending and with it goes the music on San Jose Avenue. Residents who live on the tail end of the street near Lincoln Middle School get treated to tunes al dente on a regular basis.

The school’s marching band leaves the campus and hits the road with their saxophones and trombones and drums and all the other bassy and trilly things that make songs sound patriotic and holiday-ish.

For a first-timer hearing a live band outside the house you’re visiting, it’s a surreal treat. At first, when it’s not up close, you wonder if a caravan of ice cream wagons have converged. As the notes come closer, it’s clear this is real music. It stops and starts as the instructor calls the shots. Then you go to the front door and there, right in the street, not on the sidewalk, is your band.

Every street should have one. Every school should have one. And every school budget should be able to afford one. But that’s a subject for another day. Let’s just leave this on a light note.

No more breath-holding over the anti-bullying curriculum that polarized parents into clearly defined support and opposition camps. The Board of Education voted 3-2 last night to approve the 45-minute curriculum focusing on fairness and tolerance of children who come from non-heterosexual families. Patricia Spencer and Mike McMahon cast the no-votes. The Alameda Journal’s Peter Hegarty has the story. And here’s more from Michele Ellson of The Island.

Life on the Island, the column I write for the Alameda Journal is up online now. This week it’s about the Alameda Unified School District’s proposed anti-bullying curriculum…the one that has generated buckets of publicity in recent months. I write, in part:

…teaching about same-gender families is no more about sex than the words “marriage” and “husband” and “wife” and “wedding” are about sex. Yes, marriage is based in part on a sexual commitment, but we speak about husbands and wives all the time in a way in which sexuality is not the focus. To children, the word lesbian is no more about sex than the word marriage is.

You can read the whole piece here.

A neighbor reports that she just got a phone call in which she was asked to answer a series of automated survey questions. Below is her best recollection of what she was asked:

Do you that marriage only between one man and one woman should be allowed in California?

(This last one is really confusing.)

She says she thinks there was one more substantive question and then the recorded voice asked two bits of demographic info. One, if she was 50 or older and, two, if she was male. The call came from a Washington, D.C. area code and was conducted by a survey company (she didn’t catch the name). Perhaps you too have received such a call? Perhaps you too will receive such a call?

Tonight is the first of three Alameda Unified School District community meetings about the future of Alameda schools. The idea, as I understand it, is to create a master plan for the public school system in Alameda. The meeting starts at 6:30 and Superintendent Kirsten Vital as well as members of the school board will be discussing three possible scenarios for addressing the long term fiscal sustainability of public education in Alameda. They’ll be discussing how dwindling state funding impacts the district, the possibility of chartering the district as on whole, as well as the possibility of generating more funds for Alameda schools at the local level. The meeting is at Haight Elementary.

The Alameda Journal’s report on Tuesday night’s Alameda school board meeting is here. Both KTUV and NBC came to town and did stories. Passions were high in the over-crowded council meeting room, and more than a hundred people who filled out speaker slips left without giving their two cents. At next Monday’s meeting, speakers will be given three minutes to talk…and who knows what will happen if more people show up wanting to weigh in. Here’s info about Monday’s meeting.

So, once again, an Alameda debate has hit the regional news. And the Christian right has picked up the story and run with it. There’s also a lot of heated rhetoric swirling around (check out the comments on this Blogging Bayport post).

I have to confess that the whole debate about this tiny piece of AUSD curriculum makes me sad and weary. It surprises me that in this day and age, in the Bay Area, that we are still so hostile to difference, so obsessed with other people’s sex lives, so afraid of ourselves and the world and others. What the AUSD curriculum aims to do is teach reality: that all families (the majority of families, in fact) don’t look like the Cleavers. Families have all sorts of configurations, incorporating grandparents and cousins, step-siblings and stepfathers, same gender couples and opposite gender couples. That is reality. We can not like it, but, in reality, families have great variety.

The curriculum also aims to address another reality: that kids can be cruel, and they can torment and tease and poke and prod so severely as to destroy lives (just look at suicide rates for gay and lesbian youth). And it is incumbent on us as a society to protect our children, all our children. Pretending that acceptance and cruelty are not serious school issues helps no one.

With all the fervor, tonight’s school board meeting is sure to be a heated one. But if we can remember the basics, live and let live, do onto others, love thy neighbor, I think we can put this in its proper place and move on, continuing on with our work and household chores and other duties and obligations…We can continue on with the life basics shared by and important to all families regardless of their configuration. Because, despite everything, we are all a whole lot more alike than we are different.

It would have been hard not to notice that there’s been a lot of heated discussion in Alameda about a proposed addition to the Alameda Unified School District’s anti-bullying curriculum. The Alameda Journal last week ran comments in support and against it.

Local Blogger Lauren Do has been tracing what specifically the curriculum will look like. And, for those of you interested, you can always find heated discussion in the comments on Do’s blog. Sometimes commentors make sense, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they’re nasty and contradictory, sometimes they’re not.

Opposition to the proposed curriculum runs the gamut. From those who believe that homosexuality is a sin, to those who fear that sexual terms will be introduced at too young an age. You can see all the lessons here. The Rev. Laura Rose, pastor of Alameda’s First Congregational Church, wrote this in a letter to the editor:

For those who object to this sort of curriculum on the basis that it is against a specific set of religious or moral beliefs, I would simply say that respect and tolerance for all people as children of God is the unifying and core principle of every world religion.

But more importantly, equality is the core principle of our Constitution and I believe a curriculum that enables children to see all people (and themselves) in a positive light is critical to AUSD’s mission of making Alameda a safe and welcoming place for all children and all families.

You can read Rose’s whole letter here (though you must scroll down). Happy Monday.

Back in December of 2007, two College of Alameda students were disciplined and threatened with expulsion for praying.

From the accounts I’ve read, it sounds like one student was praying with an instructor in an office shared by another instructor and refused to stop at the request of instructor whose office it was. Words were then exchanged between the instructor, the praying student, and the student’s friend. From Peter Hegarty’s Alameda Journal account, Steven Wood the attorney for the students said:

It’s not about money at all, it’s about principle…The students want the district to admit that it was wrong, apologize and recognize that they have the right to take part in nondisruptive prayer.

The story has been covered in the religious press: here and here. In a March 31 ruling, a San Francisco judge denied the College of Alameda’s request to dismiss the case and so it will continue to work its way through the court system.

An Alameda County judge has issued a tentative ruling today in Borikas v. Alameda Unified School District, the suit filed last fall against Measure H.

Measure H is the parcel tax that passed last June with the support of more than two-thirds of Alameda voters. The tentative ruling in Borikas is good news for the school district, with the judge tentatively finding that Measure H applies uniformly and therefore does not violate Cal. Government Code section 50079, which requires that school parcel taxes apply uniformly to all taxpayers or all real property within the school district. The court will hear argument on the tentative ruling on Tuesday, March 17.

More info about the lawsuits against Measure H here and here.