[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.] By Susan Crabtree Real Clear Wire It’s been just a few days since Gov. Gavin Newsom and state education officials publicly clashed with two southern California school boards, the latest front in the nation’s balkanized culture wars. Both sides are claiming victory and impugning…
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[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
It’s been just a few days since Gov. Gavin Newsom and state education officials publicly clashed with two southern California school boards, the latest front in the nation’s balkanized culture wars. Both sides are claiming victory and impugning the other’s legal arguments, setting up a showdown over control of schools across the state that will no doubt influence education standards across the nation.
A school board in southwest Riverside County, a sprawling suburb of tract homes, horse ranches, and touristy vineyards, rejected a new state-produced elementary social studies textbook. The Temecula Valley Unified School District school board’s conservative majority argued that parents did not have enough involvement in approving the textbook, pointing specifically to the supplemental curriculum that included a biography of gay rights leader Harvey Milk, the former San Francisco supervisor and gay rights trailblazer who was assassinated in 1978.
The conservatives, led by the board president, Joseph Komrosky, took issue with Milk’s well-documented relationship with a 16-year-old boy when he was in his 30s, with some school board members labeling Milk a “pedophile.” Newsom and state education officials dismissed the concern as “offensive” and “ignorant” without addressing the substance of the conservatives’ complaint.
“This isn’t Texas or Florida,” Newsom tweeted in early June. “In the Golden State, our kids have the freedom to learn. Congrats Mr. Komrosky you have our attention. Stay tuned.”
The governor and other top state education officials argue that rejecting the new curriculum would force the district to use textbooks published in 2006 that don’t comply with a 2011 state law requiring schools to teach students about the historical contributions of gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans and other minority groups.
The feud between Newsom and conservative members of the southwest Riverside County school board intensified last week after the board voted 3-2 once again to prohibit the state-approved elementary school social studies materials. Newsom vowed to send the textbooks to the district anyway, take the county to court, and threatened to slap the school district with a $1.5 million fine.
The school board then partially reversed course in an emergency Friday meeting lasting until nearly midnight. In a 4-0 vote with one conservative board member absent, the board approved the overall curriculum but agreed to postpone one of its fourth grade lessons on civil rights, including the gay rights movement, so that it could be reviewed further.
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The board’s compromise didn’t mollify Newsom, a liberal Democrat who many political watchers believe is running a shadow campaign for president and will step in if Biden’s health falters. He spent part of his summer on a tour of red states assailing GOP governors and their policies. In a sharply worded statement issued after the board’s vote, Newsom impugned his opponents’ motives and warned that the board still faces a civil rights investigation by the state Justice Department.
Gavin Newsom (Video screenshot)
“Fortunately, now students will receive the basic materials needed to learn,” Newsom said. “But this vote lays bare the true motives of those who opposed this curriculum. This has never been about parents’ rights. It’s not even about Harvey Milk – who appears nowhere in the textbook students receive. This is about extremists’ desire to control information and the materials used to teach our children.”
"Demagogues who whitewash history, censor books, and perpetuate prejudice must never succeed,” Newsom added. “Hate doesn’t belong in our classrooms, and because of the board’s majority’s antics, Temecula has a civil rights investigation to answer for.”
Board President Komrosky, a professor at Mt. San Antonio College who was part of the conservative bloc, proposed the compromise that was ultimately approved. After the late-night vote, he said he wasn’t caving to Newsom’s demands but wanted to avoid legal liability.
Komrosky acknowledged that the district risked a lawsuit if it didn’t adopt the curriculum in time for school to start in mid-August.
“We have a fiscal responsibility so that I cannot steer this district into more legalities,” he told reporters. “I will not.” If the board later discovers any “vulgarity, profanity, obscenity, erotica” or other objectionable material, “we can pull the e-brake,” he added.
Rep. Darrell Issa, a Republican who represents Temecula in Congress, praised the board’s willingness to fight against state-imposed curricula and said this is only the opening skirmish in a long battle over parental rights in public schools.
“What we saw in Temecula was a key victory for parents and a validation of the power of their voice,” Issa told RealClearPolitics in a statement. “It is Governor Newsom, not citizen leaders in Temecula, who is out of step. Parents in Temecula and elsewhere know this is worth the fight, and this is only the beginning of parents taking back their schools.”
Equality California, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group, also claimed victory, crediting Newsom’s threats of a hefty fine, legal action, and a civil rights investigation for the partial reversal from conservatives on the Temecula school board.
The group’s spokesman, Jorge Reyes Salinas, thanked Newsom for helping to protect LGBTQ+ youth from “far-right homophobic and transphobic board members.”
“This is a repeating cycle of far-right extremists whose main agenda here is not about education or ‘protecting children.’ It’s really about trying to erase LGBTQ+ people,” he said in an interview.
Those behind the school board’s fight for parental rights say they represent the mainstream view, and LGBTQ+ advocates, and those advocating for them in Sacramento, are the extremists. They cite a recent Rasmussen Results poll of California voters that found 84% would support a local law that required parents to be notified of any major change in a child’s physical, mental, or emotional performance, including 66% who would strongly support it. If such a law included notifying parents of a child identifying, requesting to identify, or being treated as a gender that doesn’t align with their sex identified at birth, 62% of California voters would be more likely to support it.
Lance Christensen, a former state legislative staffer who ran for California superintendent of schools as a Republican last year, now serves as the vice president of education policy and government at the conservative California Policy Center.
Speculating that Newsom’s presumed presidential ambitions are at play in the controversy, Christensen told RCP that Newsom “needs a target, and he’s decided to pick on independently elected board members on the Temecula Valley unified school district.” Christensen characterized Newsom’s threat of a $1.5 million fine against the Temecula Valley school district as a severe legal overreach.
“What he did in response was illegal and has a chilling effect on other school boards across the state,” Christensen said. “The governor has zero legislative authority to fine a school district because they pick a curriculum he doesn’t like.”
Democrats in the legislature are pressing forward with a bill, AB 1078, that would grant them more power to prevent school boards from rejecting state-developed curricula and rules. Given the spate of fierce school board battles, conservatives worry that liberal lawmakers will fast-track the measure once they return from their month-long summer break in mid-August.
“We’ve never seen this level of involvement by a California governor into local districts where there is supposed to be local control,” Marlo Tucker, California state director of Concerned Women for America, told RCP. “The threats appear to be an attempt to intimidate boards into compliance with [California Department of Education] directives. For boards dominated by a more left-leaning majority, they will probably strengthen their resolve to do so. For boards like those in Chino Valley, the effect may be just the opposite.”
“At least that’s what we saw last week,” she added. “Parents are rising up across the state, and they are saying they don’t want the state to parent their children.”
The California Policy Center and Concerned Women for America are two of 19 conservative groups in the Coalition for Parental Rights, an organization pressing school boards across California to adopt parental notifications policies in response to statewide education policies that prohibit teachers and staff from disclosing students’ sexual and gender identities to their parents and legal guardians.
While Newsom was waging a war of words with the Temecula school board, Tony Thurmond, California’s superintendent for public instruction, was on the front lines, directly confronting the Chino Valley Unified School District board in another part of Southern California.
Last Thursday, the Chino school board passed a policy, similar to a bill blocked in the legislature earlier this year, requiring district teachers and staff to notify parents if a student asks about gender change, changes their pronouns, or starts identifying as LGBTQ+.
Thurmond, joined by LGBTQ+ students and activists, showed up at the meeting to oppose the policy. Thurmond warned that it might be illegal and would “put our students at risk” of intimidation or worse by parents or other family members after discovering their interest in LGBTQ+ issues or changing sexual identity. Instead, students should be allowed to confide in teachers and other school staff about LGBTQ+ issues without requiring school or district staff to notify their parents.
The atmosphere grew heated when Thurmond, a potential candidate for governor in 2026, went over the one-minute time limit for speakers. Sonja Shaw, a conservative board member serving as president, cut off Thurmond’s mic, accused him and other Sacramento officials of trying to “pervert children,” and had security guards escort him out of the meeting.
“We’re here because of people like you,” Shaw told him. “You’re not going to blackmail us.”
Afterward, Thurmond accused Shaw of “verbally attacking him” and instructing the police to remove him.
“I don’t mind being thrown out of a board meeting by extremists. I can take the heat – it’s part of my job,” he tweeted. “What I can’t accept is the mistreatment of vulnerable students whose privacy is being taken away.”
Earlier in July, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging Chico Unified District’s policy of protecting the gender identities of students from their parents. California Attorney General Rob Bonta also sent an “urgent” July 20 letter to Norman Enfeld, the superintendent of Chino Valley Unified School District, and its school board, expressing “serious concern” about the parental notification requirement under consideration.
“As the California Department of Education has instructed, ‘Disclosing that a student is transgender without the student’s permission may violate California’s antidiscrimination law by increasing the student’s vulnerability to harassment and may violate the student’s right to privacy,’” Bonta wrote in a letter cc’d to Thurmond.
The attorney general also asserted that courts have recognized that gender identity is “a protected privacy right under the California and U.S. Constitutions.”
“My office has a substantial interest in protecting the legal rights of children in California schools and protecting such children from trauma and exposure to violence,” he concluded. “I will not hesitate to take action as appropriate to vigorously protect students’ civil rights.”
Conservative groups, however, point to a California law, AB 1266, which requires that students be permitted to participate in school programs and sports and use facilities consistent with their gender identities. They argue that it says nothing about requiring students to hide gender information from parents and that school districts are simply adopting policies of not disclosing gender or sexual identities to parents based on the Department of Education’s interpretation of the law in the FAQ section on its website.
They note that it explicitly requires notifying parents and legal guardians of career counseling and course selection for certain grades. After the mid-summer school board fights, the legal wrangling will only heat up once the school year begins.
The Coalition for Parental Rights applauded the Chino Valley school board for adopting a “policy that acknowledges the important role parents play in the emotional health of their children.” Meanwhile, Equality California and other critics are marshaling recall campaigns for Shaw and other conservative board members.
The battles have attracted the attention of Harmeet Dhillon, a conservative California lawyer and national Republican Party official who founded the nonprofit Center for American Liberty. A regular commentator on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, she unsuccessfully challenged Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in a contentious campaign last year. Dhillon is also a vocal opponent of medically gender-transitioning children and represents a young woman who is suing doctors who performed a double mastectomy on her before she turned 18.
A different conservative California lawyer early last week blasted Newsom for imposing “million-dollar fines” against school boards that “do not bend to his will.”
“This should scare you if you want your kids to actually learn things like math,” Julie Hammill tweeted.
“We’ll see,” Dhillon tersely tweeted in response.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
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