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Show - -; Saturday, April 15, 2000 siy dub . SALT LAKE CITY (AP) Two East High School students have sued the Salt Lake City School District to be allowed to form a club to, discuss gay and lesbian issues. e Jessica Cohen and Margaret Hinckley contend the district violated vio-lated their First Amendment rights of expression when it denied their requests to form the Rainbow Club in 1999 and the PRISM (People Respecting Important Social Movements) Club in January. The civil suit was filed Monday in U.S. District Court. In 19, the district banned all nonacademic clubs after students froposed a support group for gay, esbian and bisexual students. The district was then sued in 1998 by students Ivy Fox and Keysha Barnes, who claimed the ban violated vio-lated their rights of free speech. A federal judge upheld the district. Gay, lesbian and bisexual students stu-dents and their supporters have Education SALT LAKE CITY (AP) The state Board of Education has declined to take a stand on whether English should be Utah's official language. The Coalition of Minorities Advisory Committee wanted the board to come out against a petition peti-tion drive to place a proposal to make English the state's official tongue on the November ballot. If the proposal is placed on the ballot and approved by voters, state agencies generally would be prohibited from conducting government gov-ernment business or printing information infor-mation in any language except English. Some exceptions would be allowed. One provision encourages Utah schools to expand programs that teach children and adults English as a second language. It also allows schools to communicate with non-English-speaking parents in their own languages, but directs them to encourage such individuals to become more proficient in the language. lan-guage. Foreign-language classes Agencies prepare memo SALT LAKE CITY (AP) State and federal agencies have prepared pre-pared memorandum of understanding under-standing on managing off-highway chicle ,uscf( public lands p Representatives of the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service and the Utah Department of Natural Resources prepared the memorandum with the goal of finding ways to "manage the growing grow-ing OHV use while maintaining the quantity and quality of (Utah's) natural resources." "We're trying to provide for access while protecting the resources " said BLM spokesman Glenn Foreman. "The (memorandum) (memoran-dum) provides us with a consistent approach, a place to start. It is a forum by which the agencies can work together to address the use, to look at the state as a whole." j 0mi (Dp feu mm? Copy) bsn ;gpgs continued to meet after hours on public school campuses as community com-munity groups. But because those clubs are nonacademic, they are not sanctioned by the schools, which means they must rent space, pay for insurance and cannot can-not advertise their clubs at school. In the latest lawsuit, Cohen and Hinckley contend their clubs would have an academic tie to history, his-tory, sociology, government and biology classes since they lock at homosexual perspectives on all those subjects. The clubs would be open to students of any sexual orientation. "You would think educators would be rewarding that kind of initiative and creativity. Unfortunately, because it deals with sexuality in .some broad sense, it's somehow off-limits." said Stephen Clark, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah and lead counsel for Cohen and Hinckley. The New York-based Lambda silent on would not be affected. Board members on Tuesday questioned the need to make a political statement "Do we really want to take sides on this debate?" asked Denis Morrill. The board voted 10-5 to table further discussion of I he issue. The board's decision pleased Rep. Tammy Rowan R-Orem. w ho said it should not take political stands without researching an issue first. Rowan first introduced the English-only cause in 1998, when she proposed legislation that would have made English the state's official language. The proposal pro-posal failed to get support. In 1999, with the help of U.S. English, a national action group. Rowan gathered nearly 40,000 signatures sig-natures on petitions, enough to require the Legislature to consider ao English-only bill. Again, the legislation failed. Supporters switched to a new strategy of getting get-ting the initiative placed on the For example. Foreman said, there is no statewide map for OHV trails, even though the trails often go beyond jurisdictional boundaries. bound-aries. ''''' i The memorandum ' calls for establishing a multiagency technical techni-cal team to meet at least once a year for the next five years. The team would seek ways to improve communication among the agencies agen-cies on OHV issues, develop and promote a vision for responsible OHV use and allocate money and staffing for OHV trail development, develop-ment, maintenance, rehabilitation and policing. Critics of the land-management agencies say the memorandum will do little to protect the land "It's meaningless," said Steve Bloch, an attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness am da , A. The Park Record to eouri Legal Defense and Education Fund and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, based in San Francisco, joined the lawsuit s co-counsels. The mothers of the two girls, who are juniors, approved the lawsuit. Cohen and Hinckley have asked the court to force the district dis-trict to allow the PRISM and Rainbow clubs to meet ?s school-sponsored school-sponsored clubs and to pay their , attorney fees The school district declined comment on the lawsuit. Assistant Superintendent Cynthia Seidel, in charge ; of approving academic clubs and the suit's sole defendant, said in a March 1 letter that the clubs w4ere not adequately related to curriculum. The impact, experience and contributions of gays and lesbians les-bians are "not taught in the courses you cite," she wrote in explaining why she rejected the PRISM club. language ballot. Minority advocates, who had assumed the Board of Education would oppose the plan, were stunned by its decision. A draft resolution before the board called the initiative unproductive and inconsistent with the mission of public education. "They have swept this issue under the rug." said Jeanetta Williams, president of the Utah chapter of the NAACP. "This issue does have something to do with public education." Williams said advocates will work to get the issue resurrected before the board. Twenty-five states have adopted adopt-ed English-only laws, though their impact has varied. Some laws simply recognized English as a state's official language lan-guage but include no other mandates, man-dates, while others require that English be used on all state ballots, bal-lots, public school documents and for government functions and activities. on OHV use Alliance. "This is an attempt to avert public attention away from the real problem." The real problem, he said Mortday, is that; OHV are heavily damaging millions df acres'of public pub-lic lands. Those acres should be closed immediately to OH Vs. he said. "These (public lands) managers know or should know where these problem areas are," Bloch said. "If they don't, they should corns: to us and we'll point them out." Led by SUWA, a coalition ot environmental groups f led a federal fed-eral court suit last fall to force the BI.M to ban OHVs from millions of acres of wilderness study areas and other potential wilderness areas, and to increase regulation of OHVs on other BLM lands. The litigation is pending. 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