TUSD BOARD MEMBERS REQUEST PRIVACY FROM PROTESTS

posted by Andrea Kelly

Tucson Unified School District board members Miguel Cuevas and Mark Stegeman say pro-Mexican American Studies groups are violating their privacy by staging protests outside of both of the board members’ homes.

The two are asking the groups to be more civil, saying their positions as board members should not subject their homes and workplaces to such protests and what the two are calling harassment.

The Tucson Unified School Board voted in January to eliminate Mexican American Studies courses, after the state deemed the courses in violation of state law. If the district had continued offering the courses, it faced loss of some state funding for being in violation of the state law.

Since the decision to eliminate the courses, former MAS students and supporters of the program have protested the decision in a variety of ways, including chaining themselves to the dias during a scheduled board meeting, resulting in a delay of the meeting.

Cuevas says in a news release that this week, the groups showed up outside his home. In the news release, Cuevas says he lives with his grandparents and the protesters “terrified” his grandmother and his father had to return to the home to tell the protesters to leave.

A similar incident happened at Stegeman’s home, and he says it is not the first time. Last year protesters showed up and interrupted a course he was teaching at the University of Arizona, he says in the release. Stegeman is a member of the Economics faculty at the UA.

Stegeman was president of the school board for the first half of 2012, and Cuevas was voted board president after Stegeman stepped down from that post to return to being a regular board member.