Southern California school board meetings now political battlegrounds

Temecula Valley High School students rally Friday, Jan. 13, 2023, after walking out of classes in protest of a school board resolution that bans the teaching of critical race theory in the Temecula Valley Unified School District. The resolution was passed by a new conservative Christian school board majority. (Photo by Anjali Sharif-Paul, The Sun/SCNG)

By Beau Yarbrough | byarbrough@scng.com | San Bernardino Sun

PUBLISHED: June 9, 2023 at 12:31 p.m. | UPDATED: June 12, 2023 at 11:23 a.m.

It started during the coronavirus pandemic with government-mandated school closures and masks for students.

Now school board meetings in Southern California and nationwide are a major front in the culture war between conservatives and liberals.

This week alone, Temecula Valley Unified school board members sparred with Gov. Gavin Newsom, after the board president called murdered gay rights leader Harvey Milk “a pedophile.” A Placentia anatomy teacher was placed on leave after she discussed gay sex while talking about the reproductive system. And Glendale police had to separate protesters and counter-protesters outside a school board meeting as the two sides brawled over how the district teaches about gender identity.

School board meetings in Southern California were once quiet, lightly attended, affairs.

“(Board) members were mostly retired educators or active parents,” Marcia Godwin, a professor of public administration at the University of La Verne, wrote in an email. “I was the student representative for the Oxnard Union High School Board. My mother would give me a ride and was often the only one in the audience.”

No more.

In November, UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access published a report, “Educating for a Diverse Democracy: The Chilling Role of Political Conflict in Blue, Purple, and Red Communities.” The study, co-authored by UCLA professor of education John Rogers and UC Riverside professor of education policy and politics Joseph Kahne, was based on a survey of 682 U.S. public high school principals and follow-up interviews with 32 of them in the summer of 2022.

According to the principals surveyed, 45% of them reported that conflict during the 2021-22 school year was higher than it was before the pandemic. In addition:

50% of principals reported attempts to limit or challenge teaching about race and racism during the 2021-22 school year
48% of principals reported attempts to limit or challenge the teaching of LGBTQ+ student rights during the 2021-22 school year
33% of principals reported attempts to limit or challenge student access to books in the school library during the 2021-22 school year

Some of the backlash is due to anxieties stirred up during the pandemic, but the cultural issues around LGBT issues and race are also a response to changing societal standards in recent decades, according to Rogers.

“There are plenty of folks who find these changes frightening and who are pushing back, often in hateful ways,” he said. “Unfortunately, those dynamics lead to heightened dynamics in public schools. And that’s problematic because public schools are ideally places where diverse people are coming together to find ways to work together and find common ground and create community.”

In March, UCLA published a follow-up report, “Educating for a Diverse Democracy in California: The Growing Challenges of Political Conflict and Hostile Behavior,” based on interviews with 150 California high school principals.

For the most part, it showed nearly identical results as the national survey. Results were most pronounced in communities with a mix of politically liberal and conservative residents, as measured by how many voted for former President Donald Trump. For instance, principals in divided communities were more than twice as likely to report conflict over LGBTQ+ issues as compared to those in liberal communities — 28% versus 12%.

The survey also confirmed that this is a growing phenomenon. In California, 93% of principals reported the level of the “political division and incivility” had increased since the pandemic’s start in 2020.

“Teachers are getting threatening emails, school board members are getting threatening emails,” Kahne said. “School board meetings are being turned into circuses.”

In Chino, the former leader of a group of parents opposing mask mandates is now the Chino Valley Unified School District board president, facing angry protests of her own by parents opposed to the board’s conservative positions.

A year ago, Sonja Shaw was president of Parent Advocates Chino Valley, a group of Chino Valley parents opposing mask mandates.

“God forbid we even stand up for our children,” she told the board and district officials Feb. 17, 2022. “The only thing you did was push us out (of the board room). And pushing us out there made us stronger, it brought us together, and it gave us the tools to fight for our kids.”

A year later, she’s the school board president.

Her election to the dais hasn’t dimmed her passion. At the board’s April 6 meeting, she introduced a resolution in support of Assembly Bill 1314, authored by Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Corona. The bill would make public schools notify parents if their child was self-identifying with a gender that did not match their sex assigned at birth. As of Friday, June 9, the bill has not come up for a vote, either at the committee level or before the Assembly as a whole.

“My love for our children is why I do what I do,” Shaw said at the packed board meeting. She had to repeatedly threaten to expel hecklers from the room. “I am grateful someone in Sacramento is doing something to repair the damage that California has allowed.”

Chino Valley Unified has had conservative school board majorities for years, and first got involved in state politics over transgender student rights in 2013.

But scenes like the ones in Chino Valley Unified are becoming more common.

Christian conservatives launched an effort in spring 2022 to win school board seats in southwest Riverside County.

Five of the seven candidates endorsed by the Inland Empire Family PAC won in November, including locking up a three-member majority on the five-member Temecula Valley Unified School District board. On the night they were sworn in, the new Temecula board majority voted to ban the teaching of critical race theory. Since then, the board has faced meetings full of angry protesters.

Critical race theory is a decades-old academic framework used in law schools and graduate schools that argues racism is embedded in government and business systems, rather than just being the result of individual people’s attitudes. Today, it’s often used as shorthand by conservatives for any discussion of race or racism in America that can be seen as criticizing traditional institutions or the country as a whole.

“Cultural controversies used to be mostly about sex education and evolution,” Godwin said. “The curricular battles are now disproportionately on critical race theory and LGBTQ+ concerns.”

The battles appear to be hurting the students caught in the middle.

“It would be imaginable you could have lots of fights at school boards but in the classroom nothing changes,” Kahne said. “(But) what was happening in school board meetings was having a big effect on what teachers do and what students are learning.”

According to the national survey, 23% of principals in politically divided communities reported that their school board or district leadership limited students being taught about race and racism. Fewer such restrictions were reported by principals in districts with less political division, however.

In communities where voters backed Trump in 2020, for example, 17% of principals said they were told to cut back on teaching about race and racism. Similar restrictions were reported by 8% of principals in communities where voters picked Biden.

Facing angry parents and community members, districts nationally have tended to pull back from even discussing how best to teach these issues.

“In areas where there was a good deal of community conflict — efforts to attack or restrict LGBT rights, efforts to attack or restrict teaching of race or inequality — it was likely that schools were less likely to have professional development on things like teaching professional issues,” Rogers said.

Public schools in divided communities were 20% less likely to train teachers on how to better teach issues related to race or culture as compared to communities that had voted against Trump.

But in California, the opposite is happening. Public schools in divided communities were 5% more likely to train teachers how to address these issues than in communities that had voted against Trump.

It’s all enough for some educators to consider throwing in the towel.

“A large number of teachers and administrators are saying ‘Why are we in this job?’ At a time when we have a huge teacher shortage, we’re driving teachers from the classroom, and young people are going to pay the cost,” Kahne said.

In Temecula, where Trump beat President Joe Biden in the 2020 election by 52% to 46%, the battle lines remain drawn.

Students walked out of school in protest of the critical race theory ban. And when a local pastor attacked a Temecula Valley High School drama teacher for assigning “Angels in America,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning play that explores the AIDS epidemic along with religion, race, drug use and homosexuality, students and parents rallied Friday, June 2, in support of the teacher.

The heightened tensions surrounding what and how students are taught appears to be impacting their behavior.

According to the UCLA studies:

71% of California principals reported that students had made demeaning or hateful comments to other students based on their political beliefs
78% of California principals reported students had done so to LGBTQ+ classmates
50% of California principals reported students had done so to Latino classmates
66% of California principals reported students had done so to Black classmates

“Once it seems like this is a topic that you’re allowed to speak out on, and you’re not violating social norms in challenging their fellow students, some students are going to feel free to do so,” Rogers said. “And that undermines the feeling of safety and community that’s so vital for students to learn.”

But California students tend to be more tolerant of LGBTQ classmates and issues than many of the adults attacking their school boards.

“Even in areas that are quite conservative and in areas that have had quite a bit of pushback … principals are saying that it’s becoming more and more common for students to be out, for trans students to be out,” Rogers said. “In general, there’s a movement to more acceptance and more openness in the schools even as there’s a movement toward more hate playing out outside of the schools.”

At Redlands East Valley High School, teacher Duan Kellum became a lightning rod for conservative adults this spring.

The adviser to the school’s Wildcat Pride Association, which brings together the school’s LGBT and straight students, Kellum showed a PowerPoint presentation on breast binding safety at the request of students in the club.

The process of flattening breasts with tight undergarments is centuries old. But today, it’s used by transgender men and non-binary people to flatten their breasts as an alternative to surgery. But there can be health risks involved, especially when using materials such as duct tape or elastic bandages to do the binding.

After word got out about the speaker, a social media campaign demanded Kellum be fired and lose his teaching credential.

“The negative response did not come from the parents or guardians of any of the students involved in the club,” Kellum wrote in an email. “As a matter of fact, the club president told all in attendance that if anyone was uncomfortable, they should excuse themselves.”

Students, teachers and the district supported Kellum, but after 31 years teaching, he retired at the end of the school year on Thursday, June 8. The decision is unconnected to the controversy, he said.

He’s more worried about future teachers who end up in the crosshairs of the ongoing culture war.

“My concern is that the next person they go after may not have the level of support that I did,” he wrote. “This I hope will rally young BIPOC students to go into the teaching profession because they realize they are the ones who can best tell their stories. For us to realize the tenets of America, the story of the people, all the people, has to be included.”

Staff writers Madison Hart and Jeff Horseman contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the breast binding presentation at Redlands East Valley High School. It was done through a PowerPoint presentation.