As reported in Broad + Liberty last week, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has opened an investigation into Chester County’s Great Valley School District.
The reason for the investigation is Great Valley High School’s 2016 policy ensuring equal access for transgender students. This includes allowing students to participate in sports based on their gender identity.
The case was pushed by former GV School Board president, Bruce Chambers, a real American hero, who filed the complaint with the Office of Civil Rights based on the school’s violation of Title IX. The crux of Chambers’s complaint was Great Valley’s violation of President Trump’s executive orders against biological males playing in women’s sports in the nation’s schools.
As a graduate of Great Valley High many years ago, I knew the school when it was a model of scholastic leadership and excellence. It was more than a high school. It had the sophisticated feel and seriousness of a college. The school was arranged on a magnificent campus amidst the fields and forests of Chester County. Great Valley prided itself on patriotism; it is for this reason it named its football team, The Patriots. Students at Great Valley became known as the “patriots” of Great Valley.
Like every other school in the nation at that time, homeroom activities included the Pledge of Allegiance, a Bible reading, or a moment of silence (which came after the Bible was banned.)
The sexual revolution of the 1960s had not yet filtered down to the high school level, although I recall female students reading William Goldman’s “Boys and Girls Together,” a soft porn novel, “Candy,” or “The Catcher in the Rye.” If you were gay you kept your mouth shut and your secret well-guarded, especially on Thursdays, which became known as Queer Day. On that day if you wore white or green socks to school you were called queer. This was not a life-affirming intonation of “queer” but a highly insulting putdown.
In those days – the mid 1960s – Great Valley became the scene of a huge sexual scandal involving many of the school’s top athletes.
Football players, wrestlers, gymnasts, soccer players – many of whom happened to be members of the so called elite Boys’ Leaders Club (most of whom were heartthrob teen idols to the swooning female students) – were implicated in a sex scandal so wide and vast it caused the forced resignation of one teacher and a breaking news story in West Chester’s Daily Local News.
Apparently, GV’s crème de la crème male athletes were hobnobbing in a sexual way on weekends in the home of an English teacher who, along with another teacher, supplied them with alcohol and the opportunity to thrill-drive the English teacher’s red sports car. These orgies, as I’d find out many years later when I encountered the second teacher who was involved (but for some reason was not charged) in a Center City gay bar, also involved my high school best friend, a champion wrestler.
I mention this to illustrate that things were not what they seemed at Great Valley. The scandal obviously blew the lid off the stereotypical notion that only nerdy — weak — queers in white socks would engage in such activities.
A scandal like this today would have not gone underreported as it was in 1966. The news article in the Daily Local News was a small two-inch notice mentioning that a Great Valley teacher (his name was included) had been slapped with a morals charge. Yet once the initial shock of the incident blew over, the scandal was quickly swept under the rug. Or so it seemed. By the month of May those same orgy-attending athletes all wound up going to the senior prom with their female dates.
This was pre-Internet, so nothing on Google exists to confirm the scandal, just as nothing exists on the Web (except one blog post by me), on what was perhaps Great Valley’s most patriotic project in its history.
This was the Cookies for Vietnam, Project 65 campaign where students volunteered their time to bake cookies for American soldiers in Vietnam. The project became so successful Great Valley became the national headquarters for the campaign.
The school’s 1966 yearbook explains the project in detail, noting that “The Cookies for Vietnam was the most outstanding project of the year and, perhaps, carried the greatest impact of any project ever initiated in the history of Great Valley.”
Another 1966 yearbook entry, exclaims: “Batman flew onto the television screens as the Cookies for Vietnam were flown out.”
Yearbook photos show the endless boxes of cookies being loaded in trucks and U.S. Air Force planes bound for Vietnam. Conversely, when the cookies arrived at their destination images in the yearbook captured Vietnamese men and women in rice paddy rats shown unloading the boxes of cookies.
One striking image shows a smiling U.S. serviceman being drawn in a Vietnam rickshaw, presumably on his way to enjoy some cookies.
Now certainly one would think that Great Valley High, if even to honor history, would record the fact that the school once led the national Cookies for Vietnam project in ’65. Yet that part of the school’s history has been scrubbed clean.
Google Great Valley High today and you might come up with the school’s policy regarding gender identity.
“Students will be allowed to use the restroom that corresponds to the gender identity they consistently assert at school. The District will provide a transgender or gender expansive student with access to the locker room that corresponds to the gender identity they consistently assert at school. Transgender and gender expansive students shall be permitted to participate in athletic programs and classes in a manner consistent with their asserted gender identity.”
I attribute the change in Great Valley to the “bluing” of Chester County over the past decades. This slow-dribble effect eventually gutted the high school and turned it into a social lab experiment for cultural Marxists — also known as Democrats.
