The disagreement over what constitutes free speech, which in Redlands has not really gone away or come close to being resolved, revived with pulsating intensity in recent weeks.
According to those who fly, have donned or in some manner embraced the progressive banner, the Redlands establishment is dominated by a coterie of close-minded, intolerant bigots and bullies who are muzzling anyone with whom they disagree or who hold views that register anywhere other than on the extreme right side of the political scale.
Meanwhile, those claiming to be conservatives point to the cancellation strategy used by the political left in Redlands to intimidate and silence anyone who does not sign on to the liberal agenda, asserting that those advocating for LBGTQ+ community are the new-age fascists.
For years, the educational system in California has trended leftward, as a Republican has not held the post of superintendent of public instruction in California since Max Rafferty in January 1971, while the California Teachers Association, which is closely associated with the Democratic Party, has come to play an ever more dominant role in education trends in California’s public schools.
This was no less of a reality in the Redlands Unified School District than anywhere else. That changed significantly with the election of Candy Olson and Jeannette Wilson, who came into office as the consequence of intensive electioneering assistance efforts by so-called conservative activists during the course of the 2024 election.
Remarkably, in the face of Olson’s and Wilson’s elections, more than a dozen of what has since been characterized as the community’s radical leftists, instead of reaching out to Board Member Michelle Rendler to see if she could be brought into an alignment with the board’s two progressives, Patty Hollohan and Melissa Ayala-Quintero, in a series of politically tone-deaf gyrations, pressed both personal and deliberative attacks, in some case using vulgar and pointed terms, against her.
Meanwhile, Olson and Wilson took up several policy proposals which were anathema to the liberals. Among these were ending the district’s open endorsement and acceptance of gender transition by students and allowing them to engage in gender reidentification without parental knowledge or consent, removing books and literature they deemed to be of a highly sexualized nature from the district’s curriculum and libraries; and ending open and active support and celebration of what was previously considered to be alternative lifestyles/sexuality, specifically that of the LGBQT+ community – homosexuality, bisexuality, lesbianism, transexuality, asexuality and nonsexuality.
In accordance with their ideological leanings, Olson and Wilson used their authority as board members to schedule topics and items for discussion, consideration and potential adoption which included banning all flags, banners and symbols from district campuses other than the United States, California, U.S. military and school flags; a policy change requiring teachers to inform parents if their children have adopted in the school/classroom setting a gender identity at odds with the one assigned them at birth and removing those books from the district’s school libraries that had overtly sexual content.
In reaction to those proposals, a contingent of students, teachers, parents and community members voiced opposition to the direction Olson and Wilson were angling to take the district in, going so far as to characterize them as close-minded, small-minded, bigoted, anti-American and fascistic. Those in opposition to the polices Olson and Wilson were advocating networked with other individuals, entities and groups, extending to California Secretary of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who had taken stands against policies similar to what Olson and Wilson were advocating when they had been proposed or adopted in other school districts throughout California.
So far, the policy change with regard to parental notification has not formally come before the school board for consideration, primarily because elsewhere in California blanket policies of informing parents about the gender reidentification of their children in a school-setting have been subject to legal challenge and were struck down by some courts, prompting workarounds to those court-imposed restrictions, such as changing the policy wording to informing parents about any changes made to their children’s school records. One such case in California, involving the parental notification policy approved by the Chino Valley Unified School District which was contested by the California Attorney General’s Office, which resulted in a resolution in California state courts that left parental notification at best complicated and problematic. Nevertheless, two precedent setting cases by the U.S. Supreme Court, that of Troxel v. Granville and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, both of which predated the current controversies with regard to parental notification, appear to subject the authority that school districts have generally asserted with regard to limiting the information regarding students that is made available to those students’ parents to question. More recently, federal cases pertaining to California school district policies which prevent parents from knowing about the gender identity assumed by their children at school, including that of Miribelli vs Escondido School District, have given indication that teachers, school administrators, schools, district administrators and school districts are not at liberty to prevent parents from knowing about how their children are conducting themselves in the classroom and at school, including declaring or making a change in their sexual or gender identity. At present, both Olson and Wilson are awaiting further legal analysis and advice as to how the parental notification policy they are to propose is to be worded before they bring it forth.
Another controversial initiative Olson and Wilson were instrumental in getting the district to consider was the removal of sexually explicit books and materials from the district’s school libraries.
This was lambasted by Olson and Wilson’s critics as “book banning” and the imposition of their personal moral and aesthetic values on the community. Olson and Wilson were likened to leaders of the German Nazi regime of the 1930s, with representations being made that the duo wanted to take on the role of the community’s “thought police.”
Olson, Wilson and their defenders, however, maintained they were not seeking to purge the community of divergent perspectives or engage in censorship but rather to ensure that sexually explicit materials deemed inappropriate for certain age levels or which the parents of children of that age might find obscene and therefore offensive is not available to those students without proper supervision. In proposing the policy to remove the books, Olson and Wilson strove toward defining what was to be meant by the use of the terms sexually explicit and obscene/sexually offensive.
Sexually explicit was pegged as material primarily intended to produce or result in sexual arousal and lacking significant educational, literary, or artistic value. Obscene material was defined as content deemed, under available legal or community standards, as being sexually offensive.
After preliminary and intermediary discussions that went on for months and included a workshop in March during which the concept and specific elements of the proposed ban were broached and explored, the school board in June took up the explicit/obscene book and material removal proposal, giving it a first reading or preliminary passage. The board was scheduled to give the rules their second reading and final passage at its July 8 meeting. At that meeting, however, with accusations of censorship being flung about with unfavorable comparisons to the German Student Union, the National Socialist Gerrman Students League, Joseph Goebbels, the Inquisition, Pope Lucius III and Girolamo Savonarola, doubt or questions about how determinations were to be made with regard to whether certain materials were actually obscene arose. With Olson and Wilson willing to proceed and both Holohan and Ayala-Quintero against the plan, Board President Michele Rendler proved the dominant influence as she insisted on having the matter re-examined by district staff to arrive at better and more thoroughly defined definitions of what constitutes “pornography” and other key terms before finalizing the policy.
Based on what had been established so far, the policy will involve the district looking into a particular book or item available in a school library if a parent or other member of the community “perceives” it as sexually explicit, pornographic or inappropriate. The item will then be removed from the library within three days and a hearing relating to it will be conducted by the school board within 45 days, at which a determination is to be made about the item being returned to circulation or kept off the library’s shelf. On August 5, the board gave a 3-to-2 approval of the policy allowing challenges to books in the district’s schools’ libraries. It will be considered again at the August 19 board meeting.
Also conducted on July 8 was a hearing with regard to the district’s flag policy. Previously, the district permitted a wide cross section of flags to be displayed in both classrooms and other locations on campuses. An upshot of that practice was that so-called gay pride flags – ones that involve rainbows – proliferated at many or all of the district’s schools. This was, those in favor of the practice maintained, a signal of inclusion and tolerance on the part of the entire Redlands community, the district, its administrators, its schools, faculty, teachers and students. Many of those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transsexual, asexual or nonsexual are in a delicate mental condition and overridden with doubts about their position within society and whether they are accepted, their supporters maintain. The presence of the flag for those students, they say, wards off depression or thoughts of suicide the LGBQT+ community is constantly dealing with. Those in the LGBQT+ community alleged that what Olson and Wilson were in effect attempting to do with the new flag policy was to ban this very important symbol of society’s acceptance of its lesbian, homosexual and transsexual elements from the district’s schools. Olson and Wilson were nothing more than bigoted Christian faith advocates who were attempting to impose their close-minded view of the world on everyone else, they said.
Despite those characterizations, Olson and Wilson stuck to their guns and Rendler, as the third crucial vote, joined with them in voting to prevent anything other than the American flag, the California Bear Flag Republic state flag, U.S. military service branch flags, and school flags, banners or pennants from each particular school or flags, banners and pennants from colleges or student clubs from being displayed in classrooms or on the schools’ campuses.
Those opposed to the district’s new flag policy said they feared the change would trigger lawsuits against the district on the grounds that it was a restriction on or a banning of free speech and expression. Some said the district would learn how serious this issues is when a student commits suicide as a consequence of the removal of the gay pride flag.
At the July 8 meeting, Holohan, having resigned herself to the flag ban, said, “We’re hurting a lot of our students by doing this, especially our LGBTQ+ students. When something goes wrong to them, you guys are going to get the hit.” She said Olson and Wilson would be responsible “when we have a student who commits suicide or attempts suicide.”
Now, without the gay pride flag to protect them, gay and transgender students say they are fearful that it will be open season on them while they are on campus, as school is to begin in just a few days. They will be unsafe walking about on the campus, in the restrooms and will be only marginally safer in the classrooms, where the disappearance of the gay pride flag means hostility against their kind will prevail among the larger and far less tolerant population of heterosexual students.
They are not without their supporters among the heterosexuals in the student body, some gay and transgender students say. They and their supporters will find ways to message the world that they are there and ready to hold their own against anything the bigots in the district, including Olson and Wilson, have to throw against them, they emphasize. They will use symbols the straitlaced heterosexuals do not recognize and cannot interpret correctly, they say. Despite the best efforts of the bigots that surround them, the homosexuals and transsexuals will assert and claim their rights, they say.
In a recent show of defiance toward Olson, Wilson, Rendler and what was charactreized as their yes-people in the district, a coalition of LGBTQ+ students and organizers from the larger Southern California queer community put on a demonstration at the Redlands Unified School District headquarters on July 26 dubbed “Fight Forward for Queer Rights.” Those participating extended to Inland Empire Chapter 50501, Equality California, PRIDE, Together for Redlands, the Rainbow Pride Youth Alliance, the IE Prism Collective, RISE Perris Pride and Pride At The Pier.
“We’re not gong to take this anymore,” one shouted in the direction of the administration building. “These attacks will end!”
If a student wants to change his or her gender while at school, that is none of that student’s parents business, those protesting said.
If a student identifies as a girl, that student should be free to compete on the girl’s teams during athletic competitions, just as a student who identifies as male should be free to compete on the athletic field with the boys’ teams, they said.
According to Trisha Keeling, the executive director of Together for Redlands, the school board, now dominated Rendler, Wilson and Olson, acts “without integrity or transparency.”
Olson and Wilson are not without their defenders, and many consider them to be expressing sentiments identical or very similar to their own.
For a fair number of those living in the Redlands community, it is not Olson and Wilson who are the enemies of free speech. Rather, they maintain, those who articulate what in decades past were considered to be conventional and traditional values, are not only being drowned out by a much louder crowd of “woke” culture advocates, they are subjected to demonization as bigots, racists, sexists or worse. Those adhering to traditional values who assert their rights, they say, are subject to censorship and threatened with criminal action for engaging in what has now been codified as “hate speech,” they say. In this way, some say, it is that element of the community that celebrates itself as progressive and open-minded that is engaging in the fascistic tactics of silencing everyone who does not agree with them.
“They can go queer off all they want in the privacy of their own homes,” is how one district parent put it. “No one is stopping them. The line gets drawn when school starts. They [the homosexual and transsexual community] say they want free speech and to be able to fly their rainbow flag everywhere. Okay, so what if someone wants to fly the straight pride flag? Is that okay? If anyone talks about how a man and a woman make a natural pair and that a man with a man or a woman with a woman is unnatural, that’s hate speech. They’re all for free speech until someone says something they don’t want to hear. I don’t want the rainbow flag in my son’s classroom. Can I say that? I don’t want teachers or other students coaching my son on how it is alright or better to be a queer. I just don’t want my son to be subjected to that. I don’t want my son to have to hear that he might be gay and he should find out if he is. Do I get to tell them that I don’t want to hear that they are queer? Do I get to tell them that I think there is something wrong with them if they are queer? Do I get to say that? No, I don’t. That would be hate speech. They define free speech as saying what they think and preventing anyone who thinks differently from saying anything. That is not free speech.”
-Mark Gutglueck