Seeking Petaluma school support for transgender students

It had been a few hours since breakfast, and Kawika Ho, 6, was predictably reaching for the child lock on the pantry door.

His mom, Renee Ho, removed it, and he instantly grabbed a box of crackers before jumping into her lap.

Snack time is his favorite part of school, she said. Kawika smiled and nodded in agreement as he stuffed two crackers into his mouth.

On the surface, there's nothing unusual about Kawika or his family. They make their home in a quiet east Petaluma neighborhood, and on a recent Sunday morning, their four young children were playing in the front yard while their father, Matt Ho, was keeping a watchful eye from his weightlifting rack in the garage.

Inside the house, Renee, a teacher and Petaluma native, is functioning on minimal sleep, consumed by her mission to try and save their eldest son's life.

Kawika is transgender, and an eye-opening 2018 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics found that more than half of female-to-male adolescents will attempt suicide at some point.

Since Kawika's transition almost three years ago, Renee has been devoted to finding early intervention measures that could combat those figures, and subdue the underlying factors rooted in the second-leading cause of death for people between the age of 10 and 24.

“It's an epidemic,” she said, “and as a mother, I can't just sit back and let those statistics come into fruition with him.”

Renee eventually discovered a professional development program by the Human Rights Commission called “Welcoming Schools,” which provides teachers with specialized gender and LGBTQ training that helps reduce biases and foster a more inclusive environment.

Since then, she has been tirelessly fighting to get it implemented at Kawika's school, Loma Vista Immersion Academy, working in conjunction with the administration and Old Adobe School District officials to potentially get a pilot program that, if successful, could spur its adoption districtwide.

“Without more specific education, even the best teachers – and he's had the best teachers – there are still holes,” Renee said. “If you haven't had experience with teaching a gender expansive or transgender student, you're not going to know 100 percent how to do that. And because of some bumps along the way and the statistics being so alarming, we had to do something.”

Introducing Welcome Schools to Petaluma is far from a sure thing, though.

The program costs roughly $37,000, and requires teachers to devote a total of seven days to training over a three-year span. To accommodate it, administrators will have to add the training on top of the typical curriculum development teachers undergo annually, a hurdle district officials said could delay its realization until the 2020-21 school year.

And even though the Loma Vista faculty and parent-teacher association are onboard, making all this happen has forced the Ho family to publicly discuss an issue that they never expected to be advocates for – in a world that still hasn't embraced it.

If Old Adobe institutes the training at its schools, it would be the first district in the North Bay to do so, according to HRC spokesperson Elliott Kozuch.

‘Follow his lead'

When Kawika was 2 years old, his parents noticed aspects of his behavior that resembled more of the traditional, masculine forms of expression. At the time, they thought nothing of it.

“We just thought he was a tomboy,” said Matt, who works as a pharmacist in Santa Rosa.

About a year later, those actions became words, and Kawika was communicating constantly that he was a boy, his parents said. The 3-year-old began pointing to feminine features he loathed like long eyelashes or pink lipstick, and went straight for boys clothing whenever they went shopping.

“We love him and were 100 percent onboard no matter what, but we wanted to make sure because we didn't know what to do,” Renee said. “We went to a psychologist who specializes in children who are gender expansive and transgender. He told us to just follow his lead, he'll let you know.”

Generally, transitions occur later in life, and there's no telltale signs that explicitly reveal someone is transgender, said Skye Nashelsky, a family therapist in Santa Rosa that specializes in LGBTQ counseling.

But increasingly more often, he said, parents are educating themselves and being more collaborative in those moments so children can express themselves without causing the kind of damage that could lead to gender dysphoria, depression or suicide.

So having less restrictive upbringings overall has led to younger transitions.

“What I'm finding more and more is it's a lot more fluid all around,” Nashelsky said. “Letting your kid take the lead is really key. If they're asking to start with them wearing clothing from the other department than the one they were assigned to shop in … it doesn't mean anything unless he says he feels like a girl or he wants to use a different pronoun.