The Chino Valley Unified School District will remain at the cutting edge of what is touted as the conservative resistance to the progressive social change agenda permeating both California and American public education.
James Na and Andrew Cruz, who for nearly a decade have led the district in an unfolding series of policy shifts that have bucked the trends in Democrat-controlled California and the often-liberal oriented professionals in the teaching profession, were returned to office by overwhelming and convincing margins, respectively, despite having to stand for reelection on terms their philosophical and political opponents thought might undercut their previously demonstrated advantages at the polls.
Simultaneously, the single member of the five-person school board who had deviated from the conservative, family-value, Christian-oriented mindset of the current ruling coalition on the panel was unable to seek election this time around because the switch from at-large to electoral ward elections put into place two years ago with election in the district’s trustee areas 3 and 4 and continued with elections this year in trustee areas 1, 2 and 5 and his lack of residency in the trustee areas being contested this electoral cycle rendered him ineligible to seek reelection.
Instead, the candidate elected in from the other trustee area contested this year is a retired Chino police officer, John Cervantes, who is at least potentially likely to hew toward the conservative path cut by Na and Cruz as well as the two other incumbents on the board, Sonja Shaw and Jon Monroe.
Perhaps the first manifestation of what is variously described as the conservative or Christian orientation of the district’s leadership came in 2010, two years after Na was first elected to the post he now holds, when the school board, led by then-President Fred Youngblood, voted 5-to-0 to allow Bible study as part of the district’s curriculum, initially as a course titled “Bible as/in Literature and History.”
In 2012, after Cruz was elected to the school board, he joined with Sylvia Orozco, who had been on the school board since 2006, and Na in incorporating as a routine element of the district’s school board meetings prayer. Over time, Na in particular, would engage in the normal round of discourse during meetings, engage in homilies or mini-sermons, stating that things had gone wrong because people in general or those with district were not adhering to the will of God, as he would encourage those who had not yet accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior to do so immediately.
In November 2014, the Freedom From Religion Foundation on behalf of two named plaintiffs, Larry Maldonado and Mike Anderson, and 21 unnamed plaintiffs sued the district in federal court in Riverside, asserting the plaintiffs were alienated or intimidated at school board meetings because of the insistence of some district officials that they had a right to engage in so-called Christian witnessing, including “prayers, Bible readings and proselytizing” in the course of those meetings.
The plaintiffs asked for an injunction against the intrusion of religiosity into the conducting of district business.
Instead of complying with the advice of the district’s legal counsel, which in private was recommending that the district simply settle the matter by complying with the several demands in the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s suit, and instead of insisting that its legal counsel, at district/taxpayer expense, defend it against the suit, Na, Orozco and Cruz accepted an offer by the Sacramento-based Pacific Justice Institute to defend the district in the civil lawsuit. The district retained, at a token cost of $1, the Sacramento-based Pacific Justice Institute, founded and led by Brad Dacus, to cross swords with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The Pacific Justice Institute touts itself as a public interest law firm that “handles cases addressing religious freedom, including church and private school rights issues, curtailments to evangelism by the government, harassment because of religious faith, employers attacked for their religious-based policies [and] students and teachers’ rights to share their faith at public schools.”
While Dacus and the Pacific Justice Institute fought valiantly for what Na, Orozco and Cruz believed in, Federal Judge Jesus Bernal in February 2016 issued a ruling in which he rejected the Pacific Justice Institute’s arguments that the district’s policy of celebrating the beliefs of a majority of the board did not violate the plaintiffs’ rights to attend district board meetings and participate in other district and school functions without being subjected to an intensive round of religious advocacy. Bernal ordered the Chino Unified School District Board to discontinue its overt and constant references to Christianity during its public meetings and refrain forthwith from inserting religion into official proceedings.
Bernal ruled that “…permitting religious prayer in board meetings, and the policy and custom of reciting prayers, Bible readings, and proselytizing at board meetings constitute unconstitutional government endorsements of religion in violation of plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights,” Bernal wrote. “Defendant board members are enjoined from conducting, permitting or otherwise endorsing school-sponsored prayer in board meetings.” Judge Bernal awarded the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s legal team $202,425.00 in attorney’s fees and $546.70 in costs to be paid by the district.
Thereupon, Na, Orozco and Cruz voted, with then-board members Pamela Feix and Irene Hernandez-Blair dissenting to retain another Christian advocacy attorney, Robert Tyler of the Murrieta-based law firm Tyler & Bursch, to handle the appeal of Bernal’s ruling.
Despite Tyler’s best efforts, in July 2018, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld in its entirety Bernal’s 2016 ruling. The 9th Circuit panel said the Chino Valley School Board must desist in incorporating prayers, proselytizing and the citation of Christian Scripture as elements of its meetings. The district accrued a further liability of roughly $147,000 in legal fees to be paid to the Freedom From Religion Foundation on top of the almost $203,000 that Bernal awarded in 2016, bringing the district’s costs in the Quixotic effort to $350,000.
Undeterred by both resounding defeats in Riverside Federal Court in 2016 and before the Ninth Circuit panel in San Francisco, the devoutly religious faction of the Chino Valley school board resolved to petition the he United States Supreme Court to reconsider the case for allowing celebrations of Christian belief to remain as an intrinsic element of school district functions, and began preparations to do so. On August 1, 2018, the board gave Tyler direction given to file a writ petition to the United States Supreme Court for a review of the Ninth Circuit Court ruling.
On November 6, 2018, Christina Gagnier and Joe Schaffer were elected to the board, supplanting Orozco and Feix. In January 2019, With Hernandez-Blair, Gagnier and Schaffer prevailing, the school board voted 3-to-2, with Cruz and Na dissenting, to cut the district’s losses, pay the Freedom From Religion Foundation its $350,000 in legal fees and cease any further litigation in the effort to preserve the district’s right to engage in public prayer, including discontinuing the preparations toward petitioning for cert with the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 2020, Cruz and Na were reelected while Bridge too was elected, by which Orozco was prevented from making a comeback to the board. With Gagnier, Schaffer and Bridge forming a ruling majority, the religiously-based agenda that had once predominated remained on hold.
Prior to the 2022 election, the district was pressured by liberal/progressive/Democratic Party aligned activists using the California Voting Rights Act to transition from the traditional at-large electoral process used in the district’s elections to ones in which the district, divided into five trustee area, would conduct the selection of its board members using a ward system. Rendering Schaffer ineligible to run for reelection that year was, for the progressive faction, an unintended consequence of that transition. Despite a concerted effort by the Democratic Party and what were characterized as liberal and progressive activists from both within the district and outside it to marshal support for Gagnier, a photogenic Democrat many considered to be a strong contender for higher office in Sacramento or Washington. D.C., she was unable to withstand the intense support her opponent, Sonja Shaw, a dedicated conservative Republican, received in the district’s Trustee Board Area 3 race. In a hard-fought battle, Shaw scored a narrow but sufficient majority – 5,190 votes or 51.58 percent – to overcome Gagnier, who collected 4,873 votes or 48.42 percent. In the district’s Trustee Area 4, John Monroe, a Republican and avowed conservative, with 5,622 votes or 55.18 percent, outdistanced Lisa Greathouse, who managed to haul down 4,567 votes or 44.82 percent old.
The four years during which the district was not under the control of Christian conservative leadership had drawn to a close. After seven-to-eight-month interim during which the new majority sought to impress on district staff, particularly district administration, that a shift in social orientation was in the making and had to be accommodated within the district, the district embarked, at the board’s direction, on a host of family-oriented policies.
First and most prominent of those was the school board’s passage, in July 2023, of District Policy 5020.1, which requires faculty at the district’s schools to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender or insists on using a name, pronoun or facilities other than those traditionally intended for an individual as identified on that student’s birth certificate. The district made certain to advertise well in advance that it was contemplating the parental notification policy. Attending the meeting where it was discussed by the board and voted upon following input from the public, was California Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond, who used the public comment period, which had been reduced form the normal three minutes to one minute to accommodate the large numbers of those wishing to be heard among the oversize crowd. Thurmond, a Democrat, made clear his opposition to the policy, stating that parents who did not approve of their children’s gender transformation might inflict on them physical or psychological abuse if they learned of how they were representing themselves in a school setting. Prior to the meeting, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, penned a letter to the school board, stating he believed the policy potentially intruded on students’ privacy rights and might interfere with educational access. The district should, Bonta said, individually have the right and discretion to determine under what circumstances and when they should make disclosure of their gender identity and to whom. Saying the policy could put students “in a harmful situation,” Bonta warned the district, “I will not hesitate to take action as appropriate to vigorously protect students’ civil rights.
The district board passed the parental notification policy 4-to-1, with Shaw, Na, Cruz and Monroe voting in favor and Bridge dissenting.
In the aftermath of Chino’s lead, at least seven other school districts in California passed identical, nearly identical or similar parental notification polices. There was widespread discussion of doing the same in a large number of other districts.
Slightly over a month after the passage of District Policy 5020.1, Bonta made good on his threat, filing in San Bernardino County Superior Court a legal action against the district, asking for an injunction against the policy. The lawsuit contended that “Under the California Constitution, and pursuant to state law, local educational agencies must ensure that any policies they implement provide equal protection to all students regardless of their gender expression, gender identity, or sexual orientation, and may not unlawfully discriminate against any protected class of students while receiving funds from the state.” The suit said the “California Constitution also prohibits local educational agencies from infringing on the privacy rights of their students” and that “the Chino Valley Unified School District has singled out an especially vulnerable group of children and youth for discriminatory treatment: transgender and gender nonconforming students.”
Initially, at least, the action by Bonta prevented the district from implementing the policy. Judge Thomas Garza granted the State of California a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Chino Valley Unified School District from enforcing the policy. He suggested the rights with regard to gender transitioning were as basic to the U.S. and California constitutions as religious freedom when he analogized changing from one gender to another to making a religious conversion, while stating that under his analysis, Chino Valley Unified’s Policy 5020.1 qualified as being “too broad, too general” while lacking “clear purpose or reference of parental support and involvement.”
Thereafter, Bonta’s challenge of the policy within San Bernardino County Superior Court was transferred to Judge Michale Sachs. Judge Sachs subsequently ruled to permanentize essentially two-thirds of the temporary restraining order issued by Judge Garza. Judge Sachs made a finding that the policy’s first two provisions calling for parents to be informed of their children’s gender reidentification were discriminatory based on sex, and thus violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Judge Sachs, nonetheless ruled that the third provision of the policy, that pertaining to parental disclosure with regard to a student seeking mental health services or protection from violence, related to information parents had an indisputable right to.
Despite those legal setbacks, the district, at the direction of the four-member board majority, inisted on coming at the same issue from as many different angles as it could until found one that could be sustained. In March 2024, the district made what legal and constitutional experts said was a calculated adjustment of the parental notification policy that Bonta challenged which on technical legal grounds was different enough and just general enough to be able to stand.
Without referencing gender whatsoever, the action taken by the school board in March by the same 4-to-1 margin that the original policy was approved, with Shaw, Monroe, Cruz and Na voting in favor of it and Bridge in opposition, mandated that schools must notify parents or guardians if a student makes any change to his or her official or unofficial record, participates in extracurricular activities, or is involved in any case of bullying or possible suicide. Based on a ruling in a case that paralleled the one against the Chino Valley Unified School District, the new policy appeared to be sustainable under current California law. Following Chino Unified’s groundbreaking passage of District Policy 5020.1, the Temecula Valley Unified School District passed a policy similar but slightly different than Chino Unified’s parental notification requirement in that it makes no reference to gender or gender reidentification. Bonta thereafter brought suit against the Temecula Valley Unified School District, seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the district from enforcing the policy. Riverside County Superior Court Judge Eric Keen refused to grant the State of California the temporary restraining order it sought, ruling there was no Constitutional violation in a requirement that parents be kept abreast of issues in a school setting that might impact their children.
The Democrat-controlled legislature, in reaction to the parental notification policy the Temecula Valley Unified School District enacted and the revamped notification Chino Unified approved in March 2024, passed Assembly Bill 1955, authored by Assemblyman Chris Ward. AB 1955, which cleared both houses of the state legislature and was signed by Governor Newsom on Monday, July 15, bans schools from requiring teachers to notify parents about their children’s gender identity. The Chino Valley Unified School District, which at this point is represented by the Liberty Justice Center, based in Austin, Texas, was aware that AB 1955 was in the works. It signaled the Liberty Justice Center that it should be prepared to react. Indeed, on July 16, the day afer AB 1955 was signed, attorney Emily Rae, a member of the Liberty Justice Center staff who is a member of the California Bar, filed suit on behalf of the Chino Valley Unified School District on July 16.
According to the suit, “Numerous studies assert that transgender and gender nonconforming students suffer from increased psychological, emotional, and physical harassment and abuse, and that transgender youth experience an abnormally high number of suicidal thoughts and make an abnormally high number of suicide attempts. Faced with these concerns, various California school districts have adopted policies under which the school respects the wishes of students who ask to be treated as a gender different from their natal sex, while also making parents aware that the school is participating in the social transition of their child. These policies ensure that school districts do not betray the extraordinary trust placed in them by parents, who otherwise would be misled about a monumental change to the development of their child and to that child’s official and unofficial school records.”
In this way, the Chino Valley Unified School District is seen as being at the vanguard of the conservative Christian movement in the United States. Accordingly, both Na and Cruz are seen in such conservative political circles, indeed ones that extend beyond Chino Valley and California to other parts of the United States, as folk heroes of a certain type.
This has brought with it support that is allowing them to sustain themselves in office.
In this way, Na, as of October 29, had gathered $57,844 in contributions since the beginning of the year to assist him in remaining in office. Of that, as of October 19, he had spent $36,094.34 on his electoral effort this political season.
Cruz this year, through October 19, had taken in $33,653.42 and had spent $34,835.06. He was able to cover the $1,181.64 difference with money he has taken in during previous years.
The other victor, Cervantes, collected $55,561 as of November 1 and had spent $38,996.33 on his campaign as of October 19.
It is worthy of note that both Na and Cruz were able to steer around an effort aimed toward pitting them against one another and knocking at least one of them off the school board. By forcing the district into jettisoning its traditional at-large electoral process and accept by-trustee area voting contests, Na and Cruz found themselves in the same trustee area since they lived so proximate to one another, that being Trustee Area 5. Cruz, however, was able, well before the filing period for this year’s election opened in July, to relocate into Trustee Area 2.
As of early this week, on Tuesday, Cervantes was leading his opponent, Eric Shamp, in the Trustee Area 1 race 4,893 votes or 57.67 percent to 3,591 votes or 42.33 percent.
Cruz in Trustee Area 2, had 4,865 or 58.05 percent, while the second-place finisher, Beau McFarland had 2,428 or 28.97 percent, with Paul Michael Griffin finishing third, with 1,087 votes or 12.97 percent.
In Trustee Area 5, Na was running away with the contest, having polled 5,668 votes or 63.01 percent to his opponent Bobby Omari’s 3,327 votes or 36.99 percent.
The hidden hand in the 2024 Chino Valley Unified School District race as he was a successful hidden hand in all of the district elections from 2006 to 2016 as well as in 2022 and a slightly less successful hand in the 2018 and 2020 races, is the Reverend Jack Hibbs, the pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills. As a self-proclaimed a so-called denominationalist, Hibbs holds that Christians have a duty to take over public office and promote their religious beliefs. He has made it his mission to exhibit his control, at lest as far as he can make it extend, of the Chino Valley Unified School District. This dovetails with his goal of influencing young people during their formative years with Christian values. Using his parishioners and in concert with the members of other Christian churches in Chino and Chino Hills, he and his fellow men and women of the cloth have sought to encourage those who share their Christian beliefs and conservative political orientation to turn out and vote in local elections, most particularly those for the school board. Consequently, Hibbs has had a good run, ensuring that Orozco, Na, Cruz, Shaw and Monroe had sufficient support to be elected, and in the case of Orozco, Na and Cruz, reelected again and again.
-Mark Gutglueck