Shepard Middle School Supporters Lament Supposed Destruction of Lake County, Illinois "Community" That Never Existed in the First Place

I. Introduction

     The following is my sixth speech to the Illinois District 109 Board of Education, which governs Alan B. Shepard Middle School in Deerfield, Illinois.
     It is a commentary on the February 2025 actions of administrators at Shepard Middle School, who coerced a group of thirteen-year-old cisgender girls into changing clothes in front of a student who was born male but identifies as transgender.

     The majority of this speech was delivered live, at the regular monthly meeting of that body, on October 16th, 2025.

     Some portions of this speech were omitted in order to fit into the three-minute time limit which are allotted to speakers for public comments.

II. Speech

     Several months ago, one of your students asked critics of your locker room policy why we couldn’t simply ask for a private meeting with staff members, instead of airing our grievances in public.
     The reason, of course, is to subject staff members to the same kind of public humiliation to which you subjected the girls whom you made change in front of a male student.
     Maybe now, after hearing the critiques of you and your policy, over the last eight months, you are closer to understanding how those girls felt, and why they and their families objected so strongly.
     In enforcing this policy, you indicated that it’s fine to subject thirteen-year-olds to public humiliation and to (more or less) public nudity. Which means that you would have little basis from which to claim that it would be wrong to subject you - adults (who, unlike children, can take care of yourselves) - to the same type of treatment.
     I’m sure that you have experienced online bullying as part of the fallout from supporting this policy. But you are very lucky that nobody has come up here, and ordered you to take your clothes off (as one woman did, in another district with a similar policy).

     In April or May, a gentleman wearing a suit, spoke here, and said something like, “Outsiders are coming into our community, and destroying it. They don’t pay taxes here, so they should not have a voice. They are attacking our greatest strength… Our diversity.”
     Let me tell you a little bit about the “community” that we have here in Lake County, Illinois. As a reminder, I grew up in Lake Forest and Lake Bluff, which are just five and ten miles away.

     When I was six, my parents let me and my brother set up a tent in our backyard. Just after we fell asleep, our parents heard two gunshots in the distance, and made us sleep inside.
     A day or two later, a Lake Bluff police officer came to my kindergarten class, to explain what the police do. I asked “Gunshots were heard, the other night, near 524 East Washington Avenue. Do you know anything about that?” He didn’t know what I was talking about.
     Then I asked whether anyone’s phone number started with 9-1-1. I wanted to know whether there was a chance that somebody could dial 9-1-1 by accident.  Sure, using the word “prefix” would have helped, if I had known it. But either way, he didn’t know what I was talking about.
     The cops, here, are dumber than a six-year-old kid. That’s your “community”.

     When I was eight or nine, I got a paper-cut, and went to the school nurse to ask for a bandage. Despite the fact that the school could obviously afford it – and that it would have made me feel better - she said no.

     When I was twelve or thirteen, a parent in the area – Diane M. Ross – was found to have been sending child sexual abuse images over the internet. Principal (and later mayor) Kathleen o’Hara declined to convene a town meeting, to discuss the incident, despite the fact that Ross had been released, after her arrest, and was seen at an event, in the Lake Bluff town square, by concerned parents, milling about – near children – as if nothing had happened.

     On and off, between 1976 and 2023, L.F.H.S. teacher David Miller sexually abused multiple teenage boys. He was only arrested once, and was never sentenced to jail or prison, during that forty-seven year period.
     And Ross and Miler are just the tip of the iceberg. Charles Ritz, Cynthia Martin, Jonathan Dick… I could go on.

     In the 2010s, three teenage boys threw themselves in front of trains in Lake Forest.
     Gee, I wonder why they wouldn’t want to live in a town that protects child molesters!

     This is the “community” that I – and other critics of your policy – am “attacking”, when I caution you not to add to the anxiety of the people who live here, and to refrain from forcing underage girls to undress in front of a male.

     Lake County, Illinois had no community to destroy, to begin with.
     The only community value that Lake County has, is the “conspiracy of silence”, which asserts that this is such a perfect place, that no child ever needs to worry about being sexually abused.
     Which makes it the perfect place, full of unsuspecting people, of whom child abusers can easily take advantage. We’ve been lulled into a false sense of security.
     If this is what you call “a community”, then it deserved to be destroyed.

     This is why what you have done here, with the locker room policy, is so dangerous.
     You made it even easier to abuse and spy on kids here.

     What you did in February should haunt you for the rest of your lives, and no amount of education will make up for it.

Written on October 16th, 2025.

Most of this speech was delivered live
on October 16th, 2025.

Published on October 20th, 2025.