A day after the Orange Unified School Board fired its superintendent during a surprise special session, the biggest question was “why.”
In announcing its 4-3 behind-closed-door vote, Board President Rick Ledesma offered no public reason for firing Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen and placing a second administrator, Cathleen Corella, on administrative leave.
Board members on the losing end of that vote, like the nearly 60 parents and teachers who spoke up during three hours of public comments, expressed outrage about what some dubbed the “Thursday night massacre.”
Parents and teachers pointedly — angrily — questioned whether politics was at work.
In an interview Friday, Ledesma defended the board’s actions, saying “it wasn’t a political move.”
“This was a business decision for the future of the district and the students,” he said.
UPDATE: New Orange Unified superintendent looks to ‘be of service’ — but for the short term only
By Friday afternoon, hundreds of district parents and teachers signed up to support recall elections against the board majority.
Others chimed in as well, including Sen. Dave Min, D-Irvine, who called the board’s move “a reckless decision” and “a waste of taxpayer dollars that has the potential to destabilize the Orange Unified School District and jeopardize the education of over 26,000 students.” Min said his staff is “actively exploring our potential options for oversight and accountability.”
My official statement on the Orange Unified School District’s decision to fire top Administrators. pic.twitter.com/Vx4aIZfuO9
— Senator Dave Min (@SenDaveMin) January 7, 2023
Meanwhile, Shawn Steel, a California GOP leader who helped train more than 450 candidates to run for school boards across California last year, said new trustees have “a duty” to oust school board attorneys and administrators who don’t support parents’ involvement in curriculum and other school matters.
The board’s actions come after the most recent election when the majority flipped and now tilts in favor of conservatives with the reelection of long-time board member Ledesma and a new trustee, Madison Miner, whose campaign pledged to “create a parent-first district.”
Ledesma and Miner were joined by Trustees John Ortega and Angie Rumsey in firing Hansen and placing Corella, the district’s assistant superintendent of educational services, on paid administrative leave. They immediately appointed others to their positions in the interim.
In the minority, Trustees Kris Erickson, Ana Page and Andrea Yamasaki voted against those actions.
Erickson dubbed the surprise meeting — which Ledesma called with 24 hours’ notice — “a full-blown ambush attack.”
Trustees were not given any additional information other than the few sentences published in the legally required notice, Erickson and Yamasaki said. The meeting was called while families and staff, including Hansen and Corella, were still on winter break. The two administrators were reportedly out of the country and did not attend the meeting.
Ledesma defended the timing of the special meeting: “It had to be done now because we have to prepare for the meeting on Jan. 19 so that requires a new team in place so we can start building the agenda.”
Ledesma rejected community members’ accusations of “political grandstanding” or questionable tactics. But he acknowledged that the board majority is “looking to make some changes in the organization, and this is where it starts.”
“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.”
Contracts that provide services to students and training for educators will get a closer look, Ledesma said.
That review will begin with an audit, he said. As part of its actions Thursday night, the board majority placed Corella on paid administrative leave pending a district “curriculum and education audit.”
Specifically, Ledesma said he wants the board to take a closer look at contracts and programs dealing with sex education, equity issues and ethnic studies, which is a high school graduation requirement for the Class of 2030 and must be offered by the 2025-26 school year. California offers a model curriculum, but districts can develop and adopt their own versions.
Ledesma repeatedly referred to ethnic studies as “CRT,” the controversial critical race theory concept teaching how racism is embedded in the country’s legal systems policies. Although CRT is meant to be taught at a college level, conservatives argue its teachings about racism have seeped into K-12 classrooms and become divisive.
The Orange Unified School Board wants “a kind of systemic review of the integration of all these contracts and educational programs,” Ledesma said. “How do they comingle? Do they overlap? Is there some redundancy?”
In recent meetings, Erickson said some board members have questioned various contracts and programs dealing with social-emotional learning, which supports students’ mental health with programs that “help build our students up and look at the whole child.”
“They have been complaining over the last few months that social-emotional learning is used to indoctrinate children, but no specifics on what they’re indoctrinating them on,” Erickson said.
Educators’ emphasis in recent years on social-emotional learning is important, Erickson said, “to support the whole child and meet the needs of individual children so they can make the most of their education.”
“In order to read, and do arithmetic and all that, they have to be supported in every way they can so they can absorb the information,” she continued.
Yamasaki said, “There’s some misunderstanding as to what we are actually teaching, so they want the district to go in a different direction.”
Both Hansen and Corella were repeatedly lauded during a packed and emotional board meeting, where more than 200 parents and teachers lambasted the board.
Hansen is a respected superintendent who has received high praise during annual evaluations from the board since she assumed the district’s top job in late 2017. Last year, she was recognized as “administrator of the year” by the Fourth District PTA, which represents parent-teacher associations across Orange County.
Hansen was also lauded in a message posted Friday on the Chapman University Attallah College of Educational Studies website by Dean Roxanne Greitz Miller, who expressed “gratitude for the countless ways Dr. Hansen tirelessly, and successfully, met the academic and non-academic needs of Orange’s children and families and provided opportunities for our students at Chapman University.”
Across Orange County and elsewhere, the non-partisan and once low-profile school boards have become sounding boards for residents’ discontent. Typical hot-button topics in recent years include pandemic-related requirements like face masks as well as sex education and teachings related to racism, ethnic studies, health and LGBT issues.
In California, the GOP recently launched the “Parent Revolt,” a program to recruit and train candidates for school boards across the state. Steel, a California representative on the Republican National Committee who created the program, could not speak directly to Orange Unified. But the general goal for newcomer trustees, he said, is to reform schools and address issues that concern parents.
The first thing he suggests to new boards with a conservative majority is this: “Fire the attorneys immediately. The school board attorney is a nefarious job. … They’re overpaid, yes men … And then next, you take a look at the administration. “
“I’m assuming most administrators are trying to be good servants and not be duplicitous, but those who are sabotaging the parents have to go,” Steel said. “Those who have a hard, left-wing agenda have to go.”
The Capistrano Unified School Board also ousted its superintendent, Kirsten Vital Brulte, in a surprise 4-3 vote three days before Christmas, without explaining its reasoning.
Steel called that firing “a headscratcher” and “probably not a case of parent revolt.”
Steel said he is friends with Brulte’s husband, James Brulte, a former chairman of the California Republican Party who has also served in both houses of the California State Legislature.
In both Capistrano Unified and Orange Unified, the districts will have to pay their former superintendents a severance.
In Orange Unified, Hansen is expected to receive a year’s salary. In 2021, Hansen was paid $336,157, according to Transparent California, and her total pay and benefits package added up to $426,978 that year.
