Two Orange Unified School District board members are facing a potential recall after having been the focus of district controversy since January.
The effort to recall Board President Rick Ledesma and Trustee Madison Miner began after the board called a special meeting in January to fire Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen and place an assistant superintendent on paid leave. Ledesma and Miner voted in favor of the superintendent’s firing along with Trustees John Ortega and Angie Schlueter-Rumsey.
A 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.
To get the recall on the upcoming March ballot, supporters must file 13,046 signatures per board member, according to the Registrar. The signatures related to Miner are due on Nov. 9, and the signatures for Ledesma are due on Nov. 13.
Ledesma has been elected to the OUSD board three times since 2014; he was most recently re-elected to a four-year term in November 2022. Then, Miner was elected for the first time to the OUSD board, barely defeating incumbent Kathryn Moffat with 50.2% of the vote, according to results given by the Registrar.
During the 2022 election, Ledesma and Miner ran as part of a candidate slate that pledged to support charter school parents and be independent of teachers unions.
“I am a mother of four children under 10 years of age, three of whom attend a local public school,” Miner said in a lengthy statement regarding the recall effort. “I ran for a position on the school board with a platform that emphasized the need for a change in leadership. It’s disheartening to see that the radical recall campaign has hired signature gatherers from Los Angeles and other cities who have been trained to spread lies about Trustee Ledesma and myself.”
A local group, OUSD Recall, has been the leader in the fight for a recall, citing specifically Hansen’s firing and an exodus of OUSD principals. Supporters also allege board members may have violated California’s open meeting laws, accusing the board majority of orchestrating disciplinary actions for Hansen away from other board members and the public. (The Orange County District Attorney’s office cleared those board members in April.)
“Our reason for starting this recall is to bring our district back to the parents and not be a part of the culture wars,” said Darshan Smaaladen, chair member of the OUSD Recall group.
Smaaladen is a parent of a student in the special education program in the district. She became involved in the recall effort, she said, because of Miner’s recent effort to create a policy that would divide Individualized Education Program kids into one class per grade to give general education teachers a full class without students with disabilities.
Ledesma, Smaaladen said, has been involved with the district for “far too long.”
“His biggest offense was that he would never visit schools or even read any of his packets,” said Smaaladen. “And now, with all of this happening, he has become very active, and that is super frustrating because he does not know what is happening in schools.”
Ledesma did not respond to a request for comment.
Another group has sprung up — called No OUSD Recall — that is advocating against the recall effort. Those who want a recall are only looking for a “special interest power grab,” No OUSD Recall says on its website.
“The OUSD Board Members targeted by the radical recall effort make up a common sense, student-first majority, and it needs to stay that way,” the group says.
A representative for No OUSD Recall did not respond to a request for comment.
Politics have also played a role during the recall.
Most recently, the OUSD board has been the center of the parental notification policy, a policy that would require students to be “outed” to parents if a staff member of the school discovered that the student was identifying as a different gender or sexuality.
“Draped in ‘Parent’s Rights’ this policy will likely affect very few students in our district, but needs to be fought for those very few but vulnerable students,” OUSD Recall said in a statement. “It’s politics at its worst, the policy defies state and federal law, will likely take even more money out of the classrooms of our students with inevitable litigation, and forces teachers to work outside the scope of their training, performing duties that should be performed by school counselors and psychologists. It helps no one at a high cost to all students.”
Miner said the parental notification policy is vital in “informing parents of a child’s mental health” something that is “vital to the success of OUSD and, more importantly, the well-being of the child.”
The board plans to vote on the policy during its Sept. 7 meeting.
“What we are fighting for is bipartisan,” said Smaaladen. “School boards shouldn’t be political, and that is what we are trying to do — we want OUSD in the middle and reflecting our community.”
