Three candidates are vying for two seats in the election for the Dripping Springs ISD school board on May 6th. DSISD has been the center of a lot of attention around bathroom bills and transgender exclusion. Many DSISD families rallied in support of inclusion, as did incumbent board members Barbara Stroud and Ron Jones. They received a lot of pressure from Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and the anti-inclusion group Texas Values, including harassing phone calls.
Both Stroud and Jones are up for re-election. In a recent candidate forum, challenger Trey Powers came out as anti-inclusion, invoking the zero-sum talking point that accommodation is “at the expense of other [children].” His solution is segregation.
Segregation is always wrong. Inclusion is the new normal. I will not vote for anyone who sides with segregation. As such, Barbara Stroud and Ron Jones will be getting my vote. They sided with inclusion.
Schools with transphobic bathroom policies break the codes of collaboration. They don’t meet the standards for hosting WordCamps, WordPress Meetups, or Automattic sponsored events. They eliminate themselves from hosting meetups for many open source communities, something schools should be doing more of, not less. Phobic policies distance public education from the creative commons and the engines of modernity.
In an era of massive software driven change, the culture of public education should be compatible with the norms of agile teams and distributed collaboration. Self-organizing teams working in open by default, inclusive by default cultures build great things. This is the present and future of work. What we’ve learned over decades of iterating development culture for adult creatives applies also to students.
Our market is the world. Our audience is the world. Designing for the lived experiences of the full spectrum of human diversity requires working inclusively. Together, we will iterate our way through massive software-driven change. We will navigate disruption with compassion, finding opportunity and inspiration in the diversity of our shared humanity. We are humans making things for and with other humans, helping each other cope with sentience and senescence on our pale blue dot. Communicate, collaborate, iterate, launch. With these tools we’ll make it through.
Inclusion is the new normal. Inclusion is the way to our boldly better future. Diversity is a fact of the modern world that is good for society and good for business.
Source: Inclusion is the new normal
Passion-based maker learning, social model inclusion, and indie ed tech are the way forward. Segregation and exclusion are retreats into fear and ignorance.
Instead of connecting neurodivergent kids with an identity, tribe, and voice, we segregate and marginalize them. We medicalize and assess them. We demand their compliance and rarely ask for consent. We define their identities through the deficit and medical models and then tell them to get some grit and growth mindset. We reduce emancipatory tech to remedial chains.
Let’s embrace instead the voice and choice of project-based, passion-based maker learning and inform it with neurodiversity and the social model of disability. Create a future of education and work where neurodiverse teams of project-based learners use technology and design thinking to communicate, collaborate, iterate, and launch to authentic audiences of fellow humans.
End the segregation of special.
Source: Education, Neurodiversity, the Social Model of Disability, and Real Life
My oldest, a baseball fan, coined the term “stallbatting”. Stallbatting is interfering with someone going to the bathroom of their choosing. Bathrooms can be anxious experiences for neurodivergent and disabled people who need assistance. Bathroom bills ratchet that anxiety by emboldening fear and hate. Unisex and family bathrooms are wonderful, and often scarce. We are left with assisting our opposite sex family, friends, and clients in binary gendered bathrooms, hoping nobody makes a fuss, hoping we can relieve ourselves in peace. Bathroom bills steal that peace. Bathroom bills hurt the disabled. Bathroom bills hurt the neurodivergent. Bathroom bills hurt my family and hurt my transgender friends and coworkers. Bathroom bills are incompatible with neurodiversity, the social model of disability, and the norms of work and collaboration.
Source: Bathroom Bills, Neurodiversity, and Disability
Early voting starts on April 24th. Here is an application for a mail-in ballot. Candidate applications and bios, which still contain very little information or transparency, are available here.
