Voters will decide whether to recall two Orange Unified School District board members, Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner, in the March 5 presidential primary election.
The Orange County Registrar of Voters gave notice of the election date on Tuesday, Dec. 5, to voters who live in the OUSD boundary lines. They will be able to cast their vote by mail starting Feb. 5 and in-person vote centers will be open on Feb. 24.
The OUSD district encompasses the cities of Orange and Villa Park and the Anaheim Hills community. Voters who live in those boundary lines may vote even if they do not have a student attending any of the district’s schools.
“It has been the goal of the OUSD Recall Committee to have the recall elections as a wrap-in election to minimize costs to voters and encourage voter participation throughout this process,” said Darshan Smaaladen, one of the leaders of OUSD Recall group. “As parents, teachers and community members of the Orange Unified community, on March 5 we ask voters to choose competence over chaos, corruption and culture wars.”
Neither Ledesma, the board president, nor Miner, a trustee, could be immediately reached for comment Wednesday.
But Miner has 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 of the recall effort in September.
In an effort to garner support for a “no-recall effort,” Miner and Ledesma, alongside Orange County Board Supervisor Don Wagner and Orange County Board of Education Trustee Ken Williams, held a rally in September to urge community members not to sign the recall petition.
There were 15,016 and 14,736 valid petition signatures submitted to recall Ledesma and Miner, respectively, to the Registrar on Sept. 27 — over a month before they were due to ensure the recall elections would be eligible for the March 5 primary.
The certificate of sufficiency was submitted at the OUSD board meeting on Thursday, Nov. 16. The board was able to decide when the recall election would occur or let the Registrar determine the date of the election.
The OUSD Recall group launched the effort to oust the two members after the school board hastily 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.
“The Orange Unified board majority shattered community trust by scheduling a meeting, during vacation, with only a vague agenda posted to the district website, to fire our award-winning superintendent without cause or any transparency,” said Smaaladen. “A decision, pre-concluded, made without any stakeholder input that threw our district into chaos.”
“They have alienated our teachers and wasted our money.,” Smaaladen said.
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.”
More recently, the OUSD board enacted a parental notification policy, which requires a certificated staff member or principal to inform parents if their child, 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.” For older students, it’s up to a school counselor or psychologist to determine if informing family is appropriate.
While many California districts are adopting similar mandates, OUSD was the first in Orange County to implement the controversial policy.
“We have established a parental notification policy that requires our district to inform parents if their child’s mental health care is changed or altered under the delegated duty of the Orange Unified School District,” Miner said at the time.
This story has been updated to fix the date of when in-person voting centers will open.
