Inside one city’s battle over textbooks, teaching and Harvey Milk: ‘It can happen anywhere’ | California

The small southern California city of Temecula made headlines across the US when its school board banned critical race theory and attempted to purge elementary school textbooks that reference gay rights icon Harvey Milk.

The vicious fight over curricula in Temecula is one of several playing out in cities across the country, as conservatives seek to reshape how racism, gender and history are taught in American schools. Now, it may also have implications for schools across California. On Wednesday, a group of parents, students, teachers and a union sued the Temecula valley school district, alleging the critical race theory ban violates California law, the right to due process and the right to be free from discrimination. If the court rules in their favor, lawyers on the case say it will set a new precedent for the right to fact-based education in California public schools.

The months-long battle in Temecula, a majority-white city of 100,000 in inland southern California known for its wineries and gentle climate, has left some parents and students in the city rattled – even though they say elements of it were years in the making.

“It’s not the first time something like this has happened, but it’s the first time it’s gone this far,” said Jennifer Reeves, a mother of two who has been involved in efforts to recall the school board members who initiated the ban. “This town needs to be safe for everyone to live in.”

Temecula has always been conservative and the city’s culture could make it a difficult place to grow up as a queer person, said 16-year-old Tuesday Cortes.

In past years, homophobic and white supremacist graffiti has been scrawled in public spaces, football fans at the local high school have greeted a visiting team with loud racist taunts, and a mayor was forced to resign following the release of emails in which he made racist remarks about police violence against people of color.

Cortes said she was bullied for her sexuality throughout middle school, with limited intervention from school administrators. In eighth grade, Cortes said, classmates chanted “there’s only two genders” during recess and mocked her for her short hair. Temecula middle school did not respond to a request for comment.

But students and residents say that those dynamics intensified during the pandemic, when tensions over mask mandates and lockdown policies flared, as well as the 2022 midterm elections, when culture war issues boiled over. As in other US cities, those hostilities soon found their way to the school board.

Julie Geary, who helped found the One Temecula Political Action Committee (Pac), which aims to block extremist views from local governance, said that school board meetings hadn’t been well attended until 2021, when parents started to complain about classroom mask requirements. It wasn’t long before those meetings started to focus on issues of race, gender and sexuality in the classroom.

In the spring of 2022, three new school board candidates – Danny Gonzalez, Joseph Komrosky and Jen Wiersma – ran on platforms that opposed masking and vaccine requirements, accused the teacher’s union of working against parents’ interests, and suggested standard curriculum had been replaced by “sexualized” material. “They were saying the quiet part out loud,” said Geary.

The trio were elected to the board and formed a powerful voting block that moved swiftly to remake school policies. In December, the board passed the ban on critical race theory – a legal discipline that examines the role racism plays in American society and that has been misrepresented and weaponized by rightwing groups as part of efforts to limit the teaching of subjects relating to race, including slavery.

In May, board members and community members used homophobic language and parroted anti-gay conspiracy theories when rejecting a textbook for its inclusion of Milk, the pioneering gay activist and member of the San Francisco board of supervisors who was assassinated in 1978. Joseph Komrosky, the newly elected school board president, went so far as to call the late activist a “pedophile”, a common far-right trope. In June, the board fired superintendent Jodi McClay, a district veteran who had served in the role since 2020 and who was praised for having improved safety and instructional quality at local schools, without cause.

Gavin Newsom, the California governor, ultimately threatened to fine the district $1.5m and deliver the textbooks – which had already been piloted and approved by the Temecula Valley Educators Association – himself, if necessary.

The developments echoed those in other parts of California and across the country.

Reshaping suburban school boards was part of a national Republican strategy in 2022 to energize voters. Often, those interventions were funded by national conservative groups with deep pockets, like Moms for Liberty, the American Council and Turning Point USA. The campaigns of Komrosky, Gonzalez and Wiersma were financed by the Inland Empire Family Pac, which is headed by a local evangelical pastor.

Like elsewhere in the country, social media played an important role in organizing parents who support the conservative changes. “We don’t want p*rnographic books in our schools!” read an Instagram post from an account attributed to parents in the district. Another post – an invitation to “bring your signs and be ready to be loud” at an upcoming Temecula school board meeting – included a “Leave Our Kids Alone” graphic.

Temecula parents who supported the school board’s actions frequently framed their arguments in terms of “parents’ rights,” a term that has become a conservative rallying cry in the education culture wars.

And, some parents said, school board meetings were attended by rightwing activists from out of town, some of whom wore clothing displaying the logos of the Proud Boys and other extremist groups.

For parents like Christina Johnson, a single mother of three who moved to Temecula a decade ago, the changes have prompted serious questions about their children’s education – and the town they call home.

Johnson was eager to put down roots somewhere with a top-tier school district when she left the San Diego area in 2012. “Temecula seemed like the perfect town,” she said. “We moved here for the schools.”

But recently, she has found herself wondering whether she made the right choice.

Johnson, who is Black and describes her children as biracial, has started to feel like being a person of color in Temecula could be a “safety issue”. Not long ago, her teenage daughter was followed and harassed by a white man driving a truck, and a classmate told her son, who is in the second-grade, she isn’t allowed to marry Black men.

“It’s stressful and worrying,” said Johnson. “I didn’t used to worry.”

Raineesha Day, a teacher who has raised her children in neighboring Murrietta, and who helped create Temecula’s Race, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (REDI) Commission, said she’s felt similarly. “If you’re not straight, white, and conservative, it doesn’t feel safe,” she said.

Even some supporters of “parents’ rights” are concerned that the school board has taken things too far. Suzette Jacobsen, who describes herself as “socially moderate and fiscally conservative”, expressed fears that the board’s instability will prevent the district from attracting stellar teaching candidates. “This will have an impact on the education in our city for years to come,” she said.

Last week, the Temecula valley school board reversed course on its textbook decision, agreeing to use the books, but falling short of promising to teach the sections mentioning Harvey Milk.

In an email responding to Wednesday’s lawsuit announcement, board member Komrosky called CRT a “racist ideology” that uses “division and hate as an instructional framework in our schools”. Gonzalez and Wiersma did not respond to questions.

Jennifer San Nichols, another parent in the district, said she believes that the rightwing contingent is a small, but vocal, minority. “There are more of us than there are of them,” she said.

San Nichols describes herself as an “involved parent” – her two teenage sons grew up attending Temecula public schools and she has regularly attended parent-teacher association meetings. Like others, her school board participation began after last fall’s elections.

To her, the events have been a sobering reminder of how quickly a town’s government can be radicalized, even in a state like California.

“If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere,” San Nichols said.

But San Nichols and others say the events will not push them out of Temecula. If anything, the ban has had the opposite effect, bolstering their activism.

“The harder they try to suppress us, the harder Black and Brown parents will push back,” said Johnson, the mother of three. “I am staying for as long as I can.”

For Cortes, the local teen, ensuring that the history of gay rights is taught in school is a critical part of preventing anti-LGBTQ+ bullying. “If queer history isn’t available to learn, we will never progress and people will stay full of hatred and ignorance,” she said.