SANTA CRUZ >> Effective teaching, long-time Harbor High School educator Ron Indra, means ensuring that students see themselves in the world they are learning about.

Indra, a social studies teacher, is among the early leaders statewide pushing to bring Santa Cruz County’s LGBT history high school curriculum into alignment with state law passed in 2011.

Under a $10,000 Diversity Partnership Grant from the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, Indra and 10 other educators from school districts across the county have met monthly since January to learn to bring LGBT history into their classrooms. Each was given a curriculum guide aimed at U.S. history courses and later reported back on student reception to the topic.

“Going into teach the first lesson, I was nervous — I didn’t know how my students were going to respond,” Scotts Valley High School teacher Miranda Baker told her peers during the group’s last meeting at the Community Foundation offices on May 12. “I think the biggest ‘a-ha moment’ for me was that they’re open-minded and that they were curious. After the first lesson, they were like, we need more of this, we want to know more about LGBT history.”

Though the state’s so-called FAIR Education Act went into effect in 2012, most school districts, particularly among public schools, have not moved forward on implementation, Indra said. The bill’s name represents the push for a “fair, accurate, inclusive and respectful” K-12 education.

“The problem is, the state legislature says, ‘teach this now,’” said Indra, who also serves as director of the queer resources Safe Schools Project of Santa Cruz County. “The text book companies wait for schools to say that they want it. School districts wait for the textbook companies to put it in and it gets caught in this loop.”

With extra help from the learning grant, teachers across the county are breaking free of that cycle, however.

RACING TO LEARN

During a recent session of Alicia Guzman’s second-period class at Santa Cruz High School, juniors using their cell phones raced to answer LGBT history quiz questions with online education tool Kahoot!

While only 12 of the 28 students knew that U.S. military soldiers discharged due to sexuality were given “blue tickets,” 25 correctly identified the “Lavender Scare.” The term, a cousin to the “Red Scare,” was coined as the period after President Dwight Eisenhower passed Executive Order 10450 in 1953, establishing government employee morality and character restraints that implicitly targeted gay workers.

Nate Myers, 17, said he felt Guzman’s class a nuanced look at both the struggles and the impact of historic gay figures. Now, Myers said, he can answer questions about LGBTQ community member contributions to society. Myers has even started investigating the topic a bit in his own time, he said.

“Recognition — that’s what everybody’s wanting to have,” Myers said. “I think a lot of LGBTQ members were silenced and they didn’t get recognition that they deserved, like people who led the civil rights movements.”

IT’S HISTORY

For Nikki Best, including LGBT history into the curriculum is a plus and should be standardized, not atypical, she said.

“It shouldn’t be a big deal, because it’s part of society,” said Best, 17. “If it’s integrated into the curriculum, you’ll be influenced to not be biased or against things like that. I think it’s history, it’s not teaching opinions — as it should be.”

Even as Santa Cruz County teachers feel their way through unfamiliar territory with the evolving curriculum, the state Department of Education is in the process of adopting new history textbooks for public schools statewide. The new texts will include LGBT history for the first time. Education consultant Rob Darrow, who led Santa Cruz’s grant-funded teachers training along with Indra and Delta High School teacher Jamie Cutter, is on the state’s history social science adoption committee.

“When you start teaching LGBT history, you start thinking ‘how do you make these schools safer?’” Darrow said. “The curriculum integration is one of those areas, because curriculum is a mirror and a window for kids and teachers don’t realize that sometimes. When kids see themselves in that mirror, they do better in school.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify the leaders of the curriculum project.