The effort to oust two Orange Unified School District board members has moved one step forward.
The Orange County Registrar of Voters certified the signatures in the petition to recall Board President Rick Ledesma and Trustee Madison Miner on Friday, Oct. 20.
There were 15,016 and 14,736 valid signatures submitted to recall Ledesma and Miner, respectively, to the Registrar on Sept. 27 — over a month before they were due in order to ensure the recall elections would be eligible for the March 5 election primary.
Neither Ledesma nor Miner responded to requests for comment.
But Miner previously said: “It’s essential to note that protecting students is my sole purpose, and the radical recall movement has made it clear that their quest for power over the children is nothing more than a strong political maneuver to influence and shape the children of OUSD.”
“This has nothing to do with protecting or educating children,” she said in September.
The certificate of sufficiency will be submitted at the next Orange Unified board meeting, scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 16. The board will either then or within 14 days of that meeting issue an order stating when the recall election will be held. If the board fails to act, the Registrar would then determine the date of the election.
The election must be held no less than 88 days and no more than 125 days after the issuance of an order for the election, and it can scheduled in concordance with a regularly scheduled election — in this case, the March primary.
“We look forward to ending the chaos, staff exodus and culture wars brought to our district by Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner, and repairing the trust between our community and school board that has been broken by lies, corruption, lack of transparency and fiscal waste,” said OUSD Recall, the group responsible for the recall efforts. “Students and teachers should be a priority over politics.”
The notice of intent to recall Miner was filed with the Orange County Registrar of Voters on May 3, and soon after, one targeting Ledesma was filed on May 11. Both petitions were approved for circulation on June 5 by the Registrar.
The OUSD Recall group originally launched the recall after the school board called a special meeting in January to fire Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen and place an assistant superintendent on paid leave without explanation and over the objections of many in the school community. The group says there has been an exodus of OUSD staff because of the board members’ actions and spending practices.
In an interview after the impromptu firing, Ledesma defended the board’s actions, saying “It wasn’t a political move.”
“We are concerned about educational programs and services to the students of OUSD,” Ledesma said. “We think we have drifted away from academics and educating students. We have been focusing too much on the social politics of education.”
Most recently, the OUSD board enacted a parental notification policy, which requires a certificated staff member or principal to inform parents if their child — who is under the age of 12 — requests to use different names or pronouns or asks to change sex-segregated programs like athletic teams or changing facilities that differ from the student’s “assigned biological sex at birth.”
If the student is over 12 years old, it is up to the discretion of a school counselor or psychologist to determine if it is appropriate to report the information safely to the family.
While many California districts are adopting similar mandates, OUSD was the first district in Orange County to implement the controversial policy.
