Orange School Board Members Bad: 2 successfully recalled for supporting 'parent notification' policies wrt trans students

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2 Orange school board conservatives ousted by recalls with LGBTQ+ policies at the center​

Voters in the city of Orange appear to have ousted two conservative school board members who had spearheaded policies widely opposed by advocates for LGBTQ+ youth in a recall election viewed as a local bellwether for the culture wars in education.

The fiercely contested recall election in the Orange Unified School District intensified with the board majority’s approval in the fall of a parent-notification policy requiring educators to inform parents when a student requests “to be identified as a gender other than that student’s biological sex or the gender listed on the birth certificate or any other official records.” [The policy passed 4-0 after the three opponents on the board walked out in protest.]

A legal battle over the issue is playing out as California Atty. General Rob Bonta pursues a court challenge of such policies enacted by a handful of conservative-leaning school boards

The two Orange Unified board members — Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner — gave farewell remarks on Monday at what was likely their last board meeting.

Ledesma, a veteran school board member, and Miner, a newcomer, were warriors who took high-profile, aggressively conservative stands in front of cheering audiences of the like-minded. Their supporters included some district parents, but many attending the board’s most raucous meeting in September were religious conservatives without children in public schools, including some from well outside the community.

Opponents of the recall included conservative religious leaders and their congregants from inside and well beyond the community, as well as local charter school supporters and Republican officials.

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Orange County has historically been a very conservative corner of California -- home turf for Nixon. Currently it's more purplish, and the last two presidential elections went against Trump I believe. But still a lot of solid conservative religious roots. A similar story is being played out in Huntington Beach, which is MAGA central for the OC, where a movement led largely by older residents is pushing back on what they see as creeping fascism in city government.

Yes, you can fight city hall. Huntington Beach retirees are waging a revolution​

Protect Huntington Beach — a revolution led by retirees — is waging a spirited fight against what the group sees as a City Hall attempt to screen, and perhaps ban, library books with sexual content, reel in Pride flags and suppress voting rights.

Former Huntington Beach Mayor Shirley Dettloff, who’s almost 89, didn’t hesitate to join the resistance.

“We’re really the people who built this city, and we’re proud of what we did,” Dettloff said. “And this new council is diminishing all that we worked for.”

As mayor, Dettloff said, she was co-author of a human dignity policy after reports of a skinhead presence in Huntington Beach. But in September, the council voted 4-3 to remove references to hate crimes from the policy, and it added a line saying the city “will recognize from birth the genetic differences between male and female...”

 

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Orange County remains purple-red, but this is from a redder part of California. Eric Trump even came to a Church/PAC fundraiser for these school board positions recently.

Conservative Temecula Valley school board president losing recall vote, preliminary results show​

Komrosky was elected as part of a three-member conservative majority in November 2022. Upon taking office near the end of that year, the bloc immediately thrust the Riverside County school system of 28,000 students to the forefront of the nation’s culture wars.

Two policies — restricting the teaching of critical race theory and notifying parents of student gender identification — resulted in ongoing litigation.

Komrosky’s supporters backed his efforts impose Christian-based moral values and combat what they see as the harmful sexualization of young children — causes they believed most parents would support.

Recall supporters viewed Komrosky as wasting precious education funds to pursue legally questionable, divisive, unnecessary and mean-spirited policies.

“People are fed up with anti-LGBTQ rhetoric,” said Preston Miller, 21, a recall supporter who graduated from a local high school. “They’re fed up with the racism we’ve seen from the school board. We’ve stood up to them and we are winning. I am so proud of our community, the place where I grew up.”

[One of the ongoing lawsuits against the board] also alleges the board majority has been hostile toward LGBTQ+ topics and students — citing the board’s refusal to adopt a state-approved curriculum for elementary schools that includes a brief, optional passage in fourth-grade material about late San Francisco County Supervisor Harvey Milk, the state’s first out gay elected official, who was assassinated in 1978.

The lesson in question includes paragraphs noting that LGBTQ+ individuals and groups fought for civil rights, including the right to marry, but has no discussion of sex.

Critical race theory has been another culture-war tinderbox across the nation. The Temecula list of banned concepts embodies common conservative assertions, including that teachers use critical race theory to make white students feel guilty about being white. Many education experts consider this characterization of how teachers have been dealing with the topic of race to be inaccurate and incomplete.