The Redlands Unified School District Board of Trustees on Tuesday night signaled the readiness of its ruling majority to provide 6.8 percent of its employees with pink slips in March that will become effective in June if the district’s financial picture does not improve.
The vote by three of the board’s members was preliminary and precautionary rather than de facto. California law requires that teachers and support personnel, referred to as classified employees be provided with warning by March 15 if their employment is to be terminated in the following school year.
According to those three board members and Redlands Schools Superintendent Juan Cabral, budgetary constraints brought on by generous pay increases over the last five years and declining enrollment have forced the district into having to make cutbacks.
Contradicting that, the two board members who dissented in the vote and their supporters have asserted that the district’s preparations toward layoffs is a byproduct of the illiberal attitudes of the three board members who now constitute the ruling coalition on the school board.
Discerning facts from rhetoric in the Redlands School District has become increasingly difficult over the past several years as two ideologically-driven factions – those espousing what they call traditional values and those claiming to be progressives – have been struggling for control of the 19,428 student, 25 school for four years.
For more than two decades, Redlands Unified, much like the vast majority of the 1,023 other school districts in California, was dominated by liberal politics, based upon multiple factors, mostly on account of the Democratic Party’s solid majority hold on the state, the advanced-education status of those in the teaching profession and the power of the California Teachers Association and its hundreds of affiliates and offshoots representing the state’s educators.
Within the last decade and more intensely since 2020, growing numbers of social conservatives, including parents and social activists, have made concerted efforts in a limited number of venues throughout the state to not merely challenge the schools’ liberal heterodoxy but to strive and even lunge for political control in specific jurisdictions where the demographics and concentration of Republican or conservative voters have made takeover of local school boards possible. While many such bids at this conservative ideological assertion failed either narrowly, concingly or spectacularly, there were breakthroughs in some places, most notably the Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County, the Temecula Valley Unified School District and the Murrieta Valley Unified School District in Riverside County, the Orange Unified School District in Orange County, the Sunol Glen Unified School District in Alameda County, as well as in other districts in Placer, Sacramento, and San Diego counties and in the Central Valley. In 2022, conservative forces coalesced behind Erin Stepien in her challenge of longtime board member Patty Holohan in the district’s Area 1 race.
Redlands’ social conservatives, instead of desisting after that setback, intensified their efforts in 2024, functioning under the umbrella of a local political action committee dubbed “Awaken Redlands,” which heavily backed candidates Lawrence Paul Hebron, Candy Olson, and Jeanette Wilson in an effort to establish a traditional values coalition on the school board. While Melissa Ayala-Quintero prevailed over Hebron in the district’s Area 3, Wilson and Olson carried the day in areas 4 and 5.
This created a liberal/conservative split on the board with Holohan and Ayala-Quintero matching Olson and Wilson, making Michelle Rendler, who had faced no opposition in her 2022 race, in the position of the swing vote on the panel. In the initial months after the new members of the school board were installed in December 2024, Rendler earnestly sought to bridge the middle ground without taking sides and giving either faction a clear edge. The presence of Olson and Wilson on the board, nonetheless, created a situation in which actions championed by conservatives that were anathema to the liberals, which had not previously been contemplated or considered, were being brought forth for discussion.
Those included banning all flags beside the American or California flag and creating a system by which parents or others could challenge books in the schools’ libraries or classrooms’ bookshelves as obscene or inappropriate and have them removed upon a concurring conclusion by a review panel and restricting those competing in girls’ sports to biological females.
Holohan, Ayala-Quintero and their supporters were outraged that even a conceptual discussion of those proposals was broached let alone that the board would take action with regard to them. An amorphous group of progressives, known as Together For Redlands, coalesced in a reaction against what Olson and Wilson and their band of traditionalists were up to. For starters, they said, such a flag ban was not only closed-minded and xenophobic on its face but in actuality a disguised effort to ban the homosexual pride flag, an insult to not only homosexuals but queers of all stripe, including gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals. Banning the pride flag was tantamount to shaming those of alternate sexuality and risked inflicting on the more sensitive among them such deep psychological trauma that they would be driven to suicide. Preventing students from having access to books was indistinguishable from the book banning/book burning of Girolamo Savonarola in the 1490s or the German National Socialists in the 1930s. And anyone seeking to prevent those who consider themselves to be women from presenting themselves as such and being accorded the basic human respect of having their chosen identities recognized and honored were bigots of the lowest order who were falsely claiming they were protecting women to further their own sexist agenda, those on the liberal side of the political divide asserted. Olson and Wilson were, quite simply and clearly, seeking to impose their white Christian mindset on everyone else, they said.
Meanwhile, the bewildered Rendler was caught in a no-win situation between Redlands Awake and Together For Redlands. Those on both sides of the divide believed with the same degree of passion that the decision for Rendler was a simple and straightforward one: she should come down on their side.
When Rendler hesitated, seeking deliberate and potentially compromise, the community’s conservatives such as those with Redlands Awake became impatient with her dawdling. The buttonholed her, poked her in the ribs and told her, quietly and out of the earshot of the public, that she should do what is moral and right by just saying, “No,” to the queers.
There was nothing so subtle about Together For Redlands, which did its lobbying of her not in private but in public. Its members and others of like mind made their feelings known about the rightwing Christian bigots who were seeking to commandeer the city’s once-vaunted public education system. They told her straight out that she could either stand with those who were on the right side of history and shut down Olson and Wilson’s fascistic takeover or disgrace herself by siding with them. When Rendler continued to hang fire, the liberals turned mean.
Having been elevated to the position of board president, Rendler officiated over the meetings. She prided herself on being able to conduct open, spirited and exploratory discussions of issues of impost to the district in an orderly and dignified manner in which those participating were respectful, civil and courteous. As it grew obvious that Rendler was not decisively falling onto the liberal side of the divide, a tactic the progressives used against her was to deny her the ability to conduct civilized hearings. Instead of redoubling their efforts to win Rendler over, they openly sought to offend and insult her by engaging in ad hominem attacks on the community’s conservatives or those present at the meeting with pointed verbal abuse, personal attacks, profanity and departures from propriety that plunged the board meetings into chaos. Members of Together For Redlands reserved some of the most vitriolic attacks for Rendler.
The tone deaf political approach that the progressives in the community were taking in the effort to win Rendler over was obvious to many on hand at the meetings or viewing them on television or by steaming them over the internet. Rendler wanted nothing so much as to be respected and given her due as board president. The strategy, to the extent that there was one, was to deny her that dignity unless and until she came across to vote with Holohan and Ayala-Quintero. Meanwhile, the traditionalists, who were themselves a bit miffed with Rendler’s unwillingness to make up her mind, prudently waited the situation out, doing nothing over to offend the board president.
Rendler, stuck in a no-win situation where both choices seemed equally problematic or nonsensical, and facing a choice between two unpleasant options, found herself at last swayed more by the attacks the liberals were making on her than the persuasiveness of the traditionalists. Ultimately, she gravitated to Wilson and Olson’s side of the divide.
At this point, those at the forefront of the Redlands progressive movement maintain they were right all along in engaging in the blistering attacks on Rendler.
Rendler was never on a trajectory to see eye-to-eye with Redlands liberals and left-leaning residents in the city, a spokeswoman for Together For Redlands told the Sentinel in October 2025.
“It is implied that Ms. Rendler is solely reacting to the tactics used by Together For Redlands,” a group statement read. “In fact, Ms. Rendler had previously voiced support for banning books and banning flags during previous school boards, but lacked support for such positions until Ms. Olson and Ms. Rendler were elected.”
On April 22, 2025, the Redlands Unified School District Board of Education passed a 3–2 resolution, with Rendler, Olson and Wilson prevailing, aimed at banning transgender girls, i.e., those assigned male identification at birth, from competing as part of girls’ sports teams.
On July 8, 2025, following a lengthy and emotional meeting the Redlands Unified School passed, by a 3-to-2 margin with Rendler, Olson and Wilson prevailing, a policy restricting flags on school campuses and in classrooms. That policy prohibits the display of the gay pride flag at school facilities.
On August 19, 2025, on a 3-to-2 vote, with Rendler, Olson and Wilson prevailing, the Redlands School Board passed a policy establishing a formal, 45-day review process for challenging books in school libraries and classrooms alleged to be obscene, sexually explicit, or inappropriate for students. That policy allows the books to be banned if a panel consisting of the district superintendent, the assistant superintendent of educational services and either the director of primary education or the director of secondary education deem the book to be more sexually explicit/inappropriate than of educational value.
Not all, but some, district teachers protested vigorously over the district’s policy changes. In some cases, those teachers lodged protests that were respectful of the board majority. In other cases, those protests were less than respectful.
Those on that list included: nine assistant principal at the elementary and middle school level; two special services coordinators, including one who specializes in athletics and student support; eight so-called academic case carrier counselors; eight elementary school counselors; six secondary school counselors; four librarians; four program specialists; ten teachers and counselors with the Redlands Adult School; three school nurses; twenty teachers on assignment at various schools; sixteen physical education teachers; one English language teacher; one coordination at the district’s Academics, Arts & Athletics (AAA) Academy; two family and community engagement liaisons; nine health care technicians; three general instructional paraprofessionals; five special education instructional paraprofessionals; twelve library paraprofessionals working four hours per day; one library paraprofessional working five hours per day; one library paraprofessional working six hours per day; one library paraprofessional working eight hours per day; six full time library paraprofessionals; two licensed vocational nurses; and three special education behavior assistants.
Cabral said that the proposal was “horrible” but the district’s top administrators were making the recommendation based on the way that would best balance the district’s budget.
“It is horrible,” he said. “There is no choice. We need to reduce that,” but acknowledging, “It is not good for our kids.”
Nevertheless, Cabral said, financial reality is pushing the district into “making the decision now.” .
This week, Superintendent Juan Cabral brought before the board a proposal to inform 138 district employees that they potentially will be laid off at the end of the current school year in June.
Some of the members of the public present at the meeting, including parents, some teachers, a few of the district’s non-teaching employees and some students were critical of the preparations for the layoffs.
Some suggested publicly and some privately that the move was made in part because of the manner in which Rendler is alienated from those activated liberals in the community, extending to many teachers and members of the teachers’ union. Others have said proposal had something to do with the board majority’s hostility toward the community’s progressives.
Holohan harkened back to 2008 and 2009, when the downturn in the economy had resulted in a loss of revenue to the district. She said the district had administrators go to all of the district’s schools to interview the principals to hear their recommendations on how to achieve operational savings and determine what teachers or employees should or could be let go. She indicated she could not get behind wholesale layoffs.
Critics of the board majority have suggested that Rendler, Oson and Wilson are looking to punish district employees for having opposed the policy changes they pushed through last year and the way some of that opposition was personalized to them.
Redlands Teachers Association President Stephen Caperton said the lion’s share of the cuts the board is pursuing pertain to teaching, classrooms and services to students while only three positions are being taken out of administration at the district office. The board was not being judicious or even-handed in making the cuts, which he said were necessitated by the board’s previous decisions.
“When cuts are necessary,” Caperton said, “they must be laser-focused and focused on maintaining our mission.”
Holohan wanted the district administration to lay out other options for cutting costs.
According to Olson, the district is just coming to grips with fiscal reality. Part of that reality was created by the district intensifying spending in 2021 after receiving money from the state and federal government to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. In 2021, flush with that money, which discontinued after one-time infusions, the district provided 13 percent to 14 percent raises to teachers.
“When the one-time money runs out, it catches up, and it has caught up to us,” Olson said.
Ayala-Quintero said the teachers deserved the raises that were made after the district’s receipt of the COVID-19 funding because they had worked hard to keep the district’s educational mission running during the crisis.
Ayala-Quintero’s pro-employee and pro-union advocacy, coupled with her criticism of the board majority, encapsulates the deep philosophical divide within the district. Some, such as Ayala-Quintero and Holohan see keeping teachers employed and generously compensated as a primary goal of the district, and argue that doing so ensures a top-flight education for the students in the district. Others assert that pay, benefits and job security for teachers and district staff should be secondary to the quality of education provided to students and that if money is needed to enhance educational opportunities, then laying off non-critical teachers and staff to obtain that funding should be pursued.
Olson said the cuts might prove necessary.
District employees with a window on the district’s finances said the preparation to make the personnel cuts was a logical reaction to the district’s current financial picture and trends.
According to Deputy Superintendent Jason Hill, COVID-19 funding was utilized to hire employees as school resumed following the 2020-2021 shutdown. The discontinuation of the funding with the district still employing those added teachers and staff is draining district resources at present. Layoff would return district staffing levels to those before the COVID-19 crisis, Hill said. He indicated the district has for two years understood that those hirings in 2021 and 2022 were supposed to be temporary.
During the June 24 school board meeting, RUSD Director of Fiscal Services Kirtan Shah previously told the board that at the end of the district’s 2025–26 budget cycle in June, there will be a year-end fund balance of $70.7 million in the district’s reserves, down from $91 million the previous year. By 2028, the reserves will have diminished to $48 million as a result of declining enrollment and reductions in state funding.
At this point, more than half way through 2025-26, the district’s reserved are down to  $74 and $55 million of that is restricted funding, earmarked for spending on specifics into the future. The difference represents the district’s true reserves, Hill intimated. Much of that $19 million will be eaten up by anticipated but uncertain costs and maintenance, he said. Thus, the district has $8 million that is not already scheduled to be spent out on known costs.