[ Novice school board members get a hard lesson in politics in a
region that could determine control of the House.]
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ANGRY PARENTS PROTEST RELIGIOUS RIGHT IN A SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA SCHOOL
DISTRICT  
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Blake Jones
July 9, 2023
Politico
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_ Novice school board members get a hard lesson in politics in a
region that could determine control of the House. _

Students have held protests, and irate parents and teachers are
swarming the board’s meetings, feeling that their town, Temecula in
Riverside County has become consumed by partisan warfare. , Watchara
Phomicinda/The Orange County Register via AP Photo

 

TEMECULA, Calif. — Three Southern California school board members
backed by a far-right pastor narrowly won election last fall in
campaigns fueled by pandemic rage.

Then they banned critical race theory and rejected social studies
materials that included LGBTQ rights hero Harvey Milk.

Now, they’re fighting for their political lives.

After just six months in office, those officials face a recall effort
on top of a civil rights investigation launched by the state’s
Democratic-led education department. Students have held protests
[[link removed]],
and irate parents and teachers are swarming the board’s meetings,
feeling that their town — the fast-growing, politically diverse
suburb of Temecula in Riverside County — has become consumed by
partisan warfare.

“We don’t want culture wars. We don’t want Fox News
appearances,” Alex Douvas, a parent of two kids in the district who
previously worked for two Republican congressmembers in Orange County,
told the board recently. “Our schools are not ideological
battlegrounds. They’re not platforms for religious evangelism. These
are institutions for learning and growth.”

The religious right saw an opening to jump into the parental rights
movement amid intense backlash about pandemic-era school closures and
mask mandates. But those policies have all but disappeared in schools,
and it’s proving harder to sustain that level of outrage over
teachings on race and gender. The effort to ban certain books and
challenge curriculum has split Republicans and polled poorly with
independent voters nationally.

Local Democrats see the strategy flopping — and are already looking
to capitalize on it in a part of the state that has become a
battleground for control of the House. Joy Silver, chair of the
Riverside County Democrats, said she’s intensely focused on winning
down-ballot races like school board seats “because the battles are
taking place there.”

In Temecula, the political agenda embraced by school board trustees
Joseph Komrosky, Danny Gonzalez and Jen Wiersma has set off a
different kind of public outrage than was likely intended. The booing
and shouting at a recent public hearing grew so loud that the board
president — who appeared to be wearing a bullet-proof vest under his
sweater — cleared the room.

“To the extent you keep it focused on parents and students first,
not teachers, I think there’s room where you can push back on
quote-unquote “woke” agenda issues, but if you go too far in the
other direction and are trying to make that the only issue you care
about, I think you’re going to see predictable backlash,”
California GOP consultant Rob Stutzman said in an interview. “I look
at something like Temecula, and to me it’s an eye roll.”

A similar ethos has dominated the campaigns of Republicans like
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has made curriculum restrictions and
“parental rights” a centerpiece of his bid for the GOP nomination.
It could also factor into local and congressional races, particularly
in inland California, where Republicans are likely to face strong
challenges from the left in 2024.

“I don’t want to say it’s a particularly Republican Party issue,
because everyone who is upset by this is not necessarily Democratic,
but the people who are causing the trouble are the extremists of that
party,” Silver said.

Silver pointed to other parts of California where social policy pushed
by the religious right has met organized resistance. A recall attempt
is brewing [[link removed]] against a conservative
majority in Orange County, where a pastor in Chino
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flip the school board. A pastor in San Diego County drew dozens of
counter protesters last month after mobilizing his congregation
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a proposed school district inclusion policy. So far, the effort is
failing to sink the proposal.

An NPR/Ipsos poll
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in May found that the majority of Americans oppose book bans and
curriculum restrictions, with 64 percent saying that school boards
should not restrict what students learn. Majorities of GOP respondents
also opposed state legislative book bans and content restrictions, the
survey found — a cautionary sign for candidates who risk losing
centrist voters by leaning too hard into curriculum crackdowns.

Temecula Valley reflects broader changes across inland Southern
California. Once agricultural, mostly white and conservative, it has
become a fast-growing bedroom community for coastal San Diego and Los
Angeles. Along routes that draw tourists for balloon excursions and
wine tastings, the former Republican stronghold of Riverside County
now is home to more registered Democrats.

But Covid injected a fervor into local politics. Tim Thompson, an
evangelical pastor in Riverside County, emerged as an outspoken
opponent of mask mandates, along with the California GOP and
conservative activist groups such as Moms for Liberty, best known for
its anti-vaccine organizing. When churches were ordered closed at the
onset of the pandemic, Thompson began railing against stay-at-home
orders in sermons and traveled to Sacramento for unsanctioned protests
at the state Capitol — one of which led to his arrest
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Thompson waded further into politics in the following months, bringing
in Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)
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speak at his church when other Southern California venues canceled on
her during the summer of 2021. Locally, he pressured the Temecula
school board to take up a resolution to disobey a state mask mandate
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When they refused, he became irritated.

Barbara Brosch, board president at the time, described a tense period
in which elected officials were occasionally escorted home from public
meetings by police after being threatened by activists. Brosch — who
went to high school with Thompson — said he warned her and other
board members that he would run candidates against them if they
didn’t go along with his anti-masking proposal.

“Tim asked me to put the resolution on our agenda, or else we would
be replaced,” Brosch, an independent voter who describes herself as
a conservative Catholic, recalled of a meeting with the pastor.

A year later, Thompson made good on his threat. Three candidates
funded by his Inland Empire Family PAC narrowly won in a low-turnout
election, defeating Brosch and two other candidates who served on the
board during the pandemic.

“This Inland Empire Family PAC was using what sounded like benign
language,” said Kristi Rutz-Robbins, a Democrat who served three
terms on the school board and now teaches in the district. “I
wasn’t even paying attention during the election. It wasn’t in my
district, or my trustee zone. And I figured it’d be fine, whoever
gets elected.”

None of the board members answered questions from POLITICO at a recent
board meeting or responded to multiple inquiries about their decisions
or Thompson’s efforts to shape district policy. Kromrosky previously
said he does not attend the 412 Church.

But a local GOP leader said he was confident voters would back the
officials in a recall.

“The voters in Temecula spoke clearly during the election last
November. If the recall qualifies, I have no doubt the voters will
speak clearly again,” said Matthew Dobler, chair of the Republican
Party of Riverside County. “The Republican Party has faith in voters
to decide what’s best for their community.”

On the day they were sworn in, the new board members passed a
resolution condemning critical race theory. That landed them on “Fox
and Friends” even though the subject wasn’t being taught in
Temecula schools. Then they hired an outside consultant to run
workshops warning educators about the perils of CRT, a lens used by
academics to challenge institutional racism that is viewed by many on
the right as simply shorthand for any teaching about race that they
don’t like.

But until last month, when a curriculum fight over the late gay-rights
leader Harvey Milk got the governor’s attention, many residents
hadn’t noticed.

The board rejected a social studies curriculum that featured a
half-page biography of Milk, with Komrosky repeating a disputed
allegation against the slain San Francisco supervisor. “Why even
mention a pedophile?” he said.

State Superintendent Tony Thurmond said people attending the
California Democratic Party convention in Los Angeles the following
week asked him to get involved. They included delegate Julie Geary,
who said she also raised the issue with Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Thurmond, Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom already had a joint letter
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the works cautioning school districts against banning books and
restricting teaching materials for political reasons. But the
Democrats, dismayed by the comment about Milk, began to single out
Temecula. Newsom called Komrosky’s comment “ignorant” on
Twitter. Bonta’s office pressed the district
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justification of its decision. And Thurmond traveled back to Southern
California to meet with Komrosky and Gonzalez, who had made the same
allegation against California’s first openly gay elected official.

“If there was a single factor that was the final push for me to go
to Temecula, it was seeing the statement made calling Harvey Milk a
pedophile,” Thurmond said in an interview. The state Department of
Education is now investigating a civil rights complaint against the
district.

Less than a week later, the board fired the district’s popular
superintendent, Jodi McClay, following the lead of new conservative
school board majorities in Florida
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Carolina
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Orange County
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McClay’s supporters packed the high school auditorium and pleaded
with the board to keep her on. When that failed, they drowned out a
small group of the board’s supporters with a barrage of boos,
continuing for hours.

In California, where the Republican Party has long been shut out of
statewide office, GOP officials played a role in Temecula’s election
as part of a broader strategy targeting low-turnout school board
races. There’s also another advantage for outnumbered California
Republicans: The party affiliations of school board candidates don’t
appear on the ballot, as those races are technically nonpartisan.

Republican National Committee member Shawn Steel’s law firm donated
to Thompson’s PAC, while Dobler, the county GOP chair, helped with
candidate recruitment and funding in Temecula and elsewhere, an effort
he described in an interview
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YouTube channel.

Steel discussed the strategy at a March meeting of “The Parent
Revolt,” a California GOP group that recruits and trains local
candidates. “We make it look very nonpartisan, because every time
you run for school board office, it’s nonpartisan,” Steel said.
“And they’re the ones that people are least likely to vote on.”

_Blake Jones covers education for POLITICO California. He previously
covered education policy and politics in his home state for Idaho
Education News and cut his teeth writing for local papers in the Boise
area._

 

* school boards
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* California
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* Right wing ideology
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* fightback
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