"En Garde"

Most people either ignore the lower ballot question when they are voting and as a results sometimes there are only a fraction of the votes for the top row candidates.

Religious right gets blindsided by angry parents in a Southern California school district

Novice school board members get a hard lesson in politics in a region that could determine control of the House.

Politico

By Blake Jones

July 9, 2023

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, 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.

I know here in town the Board of Ed get elected by only a handful of votes and I worry that something like happened in California could very easily happen here. An organized group like church or a group like “Mother’s for Liberty” could take over the Board of Ed.

“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.

I have a friend who got elected to the water commission that way he got his friends to vote for him and he won by just a handful of votes, I did vote for him.

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.”

The candidates for the Board of Ed in town the only thing that we learn about them when they are running for office is what they do in their day jobs, how many kids they have, how long they lived in town, and some other fluff of unimportance. Not about anything important like if they are for “parental rights” or book banning, etc. Just… their dog Spot had puppies or their parakeet can sing the Star Spangled Banner.

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.

We have to be always on guard MAGA nut jobs or one day we wake up to a Board of Ed run by a bunch of “Mother’s for Liberty” nuts.