Good morning. Political Breakdown is back in your inbox as we ramp up for another election. We’ll be bringing you original reporting and analysis on California and Bay Area politics twice a month. Today, we’re taking a look at the elections to recall conservative school members from office.
Photo: Temecula school board president Joseph Komrosky (center) is joined by supporters at a rally on a busy street corner in Temecula on Saturday, May 18. Preliminary results show the conservative board member is losing the recall vote. (Madison Aument/KVCR)
School Board Recalls Test Strength of Conservative School Board Movement
Voters in a small corner of Riverside County appear to have dealt another blow to the conservative school board movement in California. The campaign to recall Joseph Komrosky, the controversial president of the Temecula Valley Unified School District, leads in early returns from Tuesday’s special election.
Komrosky could be the latest school board member to be removed from office this year. In March, voters ousted two conservative trustees in Orange County and another in Yolo County who made controversial statements about transgender students.
School boards had been a rare bright spot for conservatives in California. In the last two elections, Republicans made concerted efforts to win school board seats, even though the races are nonpartisan. Temecula was a success story for conservatives: with financial backing from a local pastor, a right-wing coalition won a majority on the school board.
The new board majority passed a ban on critical race theory (which hadn’t been taught in the district), restrictions on flags like the LGBTQ Pride Flag and a policy requiring teachers to report on students’ gender expression.
Similar policies were passed in districts across the state, providing wins for conservatives that were impossible to achieve at the Democrat-dominated state capitol.
Opponents struggled to respond. For one, California’s system of local control gives school boards wide discretion on how to run schools in their community. California’s Attorney General and other opponents have brought legal challenges, but those lawsuits have only halted some of the controversial policies. Meanwhile, the state Democratic party has not traditionally invested in school board elections.
Photo: A yard banner says, 'Recall Jergensen and Hurley' in Sunol on May 29, 2024, referring to a July 2 school board recall vote for two Sunol Glen school board members. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Then came the recall elections. In Temecula, Sunol, Orange and Woodland, parents and teachers have organized to remove conservative board members from office. And the cavalry has arrived: unions representing educators are often providing the bulk of the money needed to mount the campaigns.
That last point has drawn criticism from conservatives I talked to. They see the recall election as the work of teacher unions to win back seats in special elections that their favored candidates lost.
“They lost regular elections and as soon as they got majorities that didn’t want what they wanted, they put a lot of money into special elections,” said Fred Whitaker, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party. “In a special election, you can actually motivate a targeted voter base better than you can in a general election.”
After all, Komroky campaigned openly in 2022 against critical race theory, transgender expression, and what he described as inappropriate discussion of sex in classrooms.
But opponents may have been newly activated after watching the board actually adopt those policies, often after raucous meetings. Jonathan Collins, a professor of politics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College, sees the recalls as the “inevitable” result of policy overreach on the part of trustees like Komrosky.
“The national question, especially for the politics of education and the politics of school boards, centered around what’s going to happen when we have this conservative takeover of a school board?” Collins told me on KQED’s Forum. “What we’re seeing with these recalls are the consequences of some of these board members who actually have delivered.”
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