Packed crowd anticipates discussion on Orange Unified Parental Notification Policy on Sept. 8, 2023.
Credit: Mallika Seshadri / EdSource
A grassroots movement propelled by small contributions from teachers and local residents ousted two board members from an Orange County school district who supported controversial causes.
The victory came despite opposing big money contributions from conservative organizations, Republican political figures and business leaders.
More than 85% of the $227,000 raised by recall supporters came from over 400 individuals giving an average of about $450 each, with the rest coming mostly from teachers’ unions. More than 1 in 10 of the donations came from people who listed their employer as Orange Unified, including more than 25 teachers and board member Andrea Yamasaki.
The money raised, said the recall movement’s co-chair, Darshan Smaaladen, “reflects the passion for our schools and our students in the district, and the care that our entire community has that we have great public schools.”
By contrast, just under a third of the nearly $260,000 raised by opponents of the recall came from 115 individual donors, with the majority coming from conservative groups — led by the Lincoln Club of Orange County, which describes itself as “the oldest and largest conservative major donor organization in the state of California.”
Contributions also came from the re-election campaigns of Assemblymember Bill Essayli and Orange County Board of Education member Jorge Valdez, both Republicans, and the law firm of Shawn Steel, co-founder of the successful campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003.
The donations are listed in disclosure forms filed Feb. 17, with some additional large donations reported before the election in early March. Board members Madison Miner and Rick Ledesma — who were repeatedly accused of promoting their own political ideologies at the expense of student learning and well-being — were removed when the recall passed by 3,500 votes.
Following the money
The No OUSD Recall group received a number of hefty donations — and was led by the Lincoln Club of Orange County, which gave a series of donations totaling $80,500, just under the $83,261 given by all individuals to that same campaign.
The Lincoln Club’s donations, which came from their State PAC and Issues PAC, accounted for 46% of the total campaign’s organizational contributions and 31% of donations across the board.
The Lincoln Club of Orange County is funded by various business groups, and more than half of its income comes from the group Angelenos for Outstanding State Leadership, which gets all its money from one organization singly funded by the McDonald’s Corp.
The McDonald’s Corp. did not respond to EdSource’s multiple requests for comment.
On top of the contributions from the Lincoln Club, three organizations connected to Mark Bucher — the CEO of the California Policy Center, a think tank that stands for the belief that “until we rein in government union power, there’s little hope for reform in our state” — collectively gave $66,000.
Bucher said in an interview with EdSource that he “was always an advocate” for the donations to the campaign.
He also said he previously served on the board of the Lincoln Club and that he left about a year ago. He claimed that unions have “financed the campaigns of just about every elected official,” and that the donations were an attempt to “offset, very frankly, corrupt practices.”
Bucher, who supported the election of Ledesma and Miner, also said that “the trustees that got recalled were doing a spectacular job of representing parents and citizens and kids, and they were attacked constantly for it, and school board meetings have been a circus. It’s just ridiculous.”
He added that his future in political advocacy and spending, including in the upcoming November election, depends on the candidates and issues at stake.
The law firm of Shawn Steel — the co-founder of the recall campaign, who has also served as the Republican Party of California’s national committeeman and wrote for the California Policy Center — also supported the No on Recall movement. Assemblyman Essayli, R-Riverside, who authored a failed statewide Assembly bill that would have required schools across California to notify parents if their child may be transgender, also contributed.
His bill AB 1314 laid the foundation for a similar policy that has been adopted by more than a half-dozen school districts throughout the state.
The Lincoln Club of Orange County’s executive director, Seth Morrison, along with Bucher criticized the teachers’ unions for backing the recall effort, and Morrison also claimed they were “tied in with a larger Democratic Party.”
He said that “they were looking for an excuse to do something like this. This is a bigger thing for them. …That’s something we saw, and we’re happy to engage to defend the people who just got elected.”
On the other hand, the recall campaign collected more money for their campaign from a number of individual contributions.
Most donors to the recall effort gave small amounts, and Smaaladen said that the recall movement’s strategy of asking community members to “donate in honor of” a teacher, along with their matching events, made a large impact on the campaign.
Among a wealth of smaller contributions is also a series of sizable donations from the Orange Unified Education Association, which gave $52,086.50 — or 74% of the campaign’s organizational money and 19.5% of total contributions.
Educators and the unions representing them played an important role in both organizational and individual contributions. Teachers — including both the union and individual educators — gave the recall campaign $61,048.82, or 22.9%, of its money.
Teachers unions from neighboring districts, alongside organizations and political action committees representing educators’ interests, also pitched in, giving just over $7,000 collectively.
Local organizations with political affiliations — including the Democratic Women of South Orange County and Democrats of North Orange County — carried far less weight, while the Josh Newman for Senate campaign donated $5,000.
Women for American Values and Ethics, which identifies itself as a “grassroots group dedicated to advancing progressive values and ethics,” gave $1,041 to the campaign, and the Community Action Fund of Planned Parenthood donated $2,500.
What drove each side of the recall
After OUSD’s board fired then-Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen without explanation in January 2023, a group of OUSD parents and teachers banded together to start the grassroots recall movement.
The OUSD recall website explains that the group was motivated by decisions made by the school board, including a series of alleged violations to the Brown Act, banning the pride flag, passing a policy that requires school administrators to notify parents if their children show signs of being transgender and a temporary suspension of the district’s digital library because it included the book “The Music of What Happens,” a coming-of-age story about two boys who are in love.
“We knew that this board was not going to listen to parents and the district, and they weren’t going to do what was best for our students,” Smaaladen said. “We became this kind of ragtag group that has evolved into a grassroots movement of hundreds of involved parents.”
Smaaladen said the group opted to pursue the recall during the March primary in an effort to save the district money. The recall effort started gathering signatures in June 2023, and by October had collected enough to place the recall question on the ballot.
Recall leaders also decided to focus their effort on Ledesma and Miner — and dropped the attempt against board member Angie Rumsey and board President John Ortega because they are up for re-election this coming November.
However, the No OUSD Recall group has repeatedly stated in social media posts dating back to April 2023 that the recall effort is an attempt to attack parents’ rights.
“When we won our elections to the OUSD Board less than two years ago, we did so on the promise of defending parents’ rights, fighting for curriculum transparency, working to improve test scores, prioritizing student safety and ensuring education is not replaced with indoctrination,” Miner said in a statement to EdSource.
“We proudly followed through on those promises, and the radical recall attempt is the resulting backlash.”
Now, the five remaining school board members will have to decide whether to appoint two new members or to hold a special election; plus, three of the remaining board members’ terms expire this year.
“It has been a tumultuous year with the numerous changes within Orange Unified. The voters have spoken, and I look forward to our board being able to move past the politics and collaboratively focus on how to best support our districts’ students,” said Orange Unified School board member Ana Page in a statement to EdSource.
“I deeply appreciate the diverse perspectives and expertise that my fellow trustees will bring to future civil discussions that directly impact OUSD students and look forward to continuing the valuable work of supporting public education.”
Beyond Orange Unified
Before the voting started, both sides believed that the recall election against Ledesma and Miner would be consequential — not just for their district but for the state, and possibly, the nation as a whole.
“We’re going to see more of this, which is all the more reason why … we’re getting involved to stop it, to tell them that turning around and recalling someone not even a year after they’ve been in office is just a waste of taxpayer dollars. It’s just wrong,” the Lincoln Club’s Morrison said.
Efforts to recall members of a school board aren’t uncommon in California and across the nation — though relatively few actually make it to the ballot, said Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law’s California Constitution Center and author of “Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.”
Spivak said the number of school board recall efforts across the country grew especially during the Covid-19 pandemic — which he described as “arguably the biggest impact that a government ever had on our lives in our lifetime unless you were in WWII. But hardly any of them resulted in the removal of an elected official, he said.
Since then, the number of recalls has dwindled, Spivak said.
In 2023, he said there were 102 recall attempts across the country — 29 of which were in California. Michigan, which is known to be the state where recalls are most popular, had 35 attempts that same year.
“Orange Unified will be setting a precedent,” Smaaladen said before the election. “But I hope the precedent we set is to send a clear message to those that are elected to school boards: to listen to their community and to make moderate decisions that are in line with what is best for the students and not necessarily their own personal agendas.”
She added that the recall election has forced the community to pay more attention to local politics, which she said has already and will continue to “change the trajectory of the district.”
“I’ve had numerous voters say, ‘Oh, I didn’t vote in November 2022,’ or even ‘I voted for Madison and Rick, but, you know, I wasn’t really paying attention because everything was fine,’” Smaaladen said.
“And when things are fine, it’s good, you can let it be. But now (voters are) paying attention.”
