Over the passionate opposition of scores of community members, the Redlands school board gave final approval on August 19 to a[mechanism, policy, means] of banning books deemed sexually provocative/explicit or otherwise objectionable from the district’s library and schoolroom shelves.
The policy approved in a 3-to-2 vote extends to textbooks used in teaching the district’s curriculum, ones for assigned class reading in class or collective contexts as well as ones available in the schools’ libraries that can be checked out by individual students.
For decades trends in academic, classroom and social standards in the Redlands Unified School District more or less mirrored those generally extant in the educational system in California, moving somewhat leftward on the political scale. 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 unionist wing of the Democratic Party, has come to play an ever more dominant role in educational norms in California’s public schools. In Redlands, the school district, as in the vast majority of school districts elsewhere in the Golden State embraced liberal and progressive notions rather than reactionary ones in defining the curricula, learning materials and books made available to students. District officials fell more to the permissive side than the restrictive one as well in defining what license teachers were to have in instilling what was collectively taken or assumed to be Redlands community values.
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, including the traditional values coalition calling itself Awaken Redlands.
After settling into office, 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, transsexuality, 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.
A good number of those in the progressive camp recognized that two solidly-composed factions on the council had come to exist: One consisting of Olson and Wilson at the right end of the political spectrum and the other formed by the alliance of longtime school board member Patty Holohan and Melissa Ayala-Quintero, representing the left side of the philosophical divide. The board’s centrist, to the extent that one existed, was embodied in the personage of Michelle Rendler, who had acceded to the position of board president. A fair number of the community’s liberals, while aware that Rendler was unlikely to buy into the progressive agenda whole-hog, yet had reason to believe the board president could be convinced that Olson and Wilson were two intolerant and inflexible gammons prone to predictable knee-jerking and rejectionism to any new or innovative concepts, whose social orientation was too far removed from that of the vast majority of Redlands residents. For a short time, that approach appeared to hold some promise for the community’s progressive forces. There were those within the liberal assemblage who grew dismayed and impatient with having to cultivate Rendler as team member and felt that her willingness to dither between the community’s knuckle-dragging close-minded troglodytes and the more-enlightened and forward-looking elements of the Redlands populace such as themselves was not just a bad sign but simply unacceptable. They set about seeking to shame Rendler into coming to her senses. Unaccountably, however, the tactics several among them chose to effectuate Rendler’s reconversion into the higher plane of civilization included a confrontational approach and psychological pressure that relied upon verbal ambushes and shock attacks, many of which were couched in highly offensive personal terms that included vulgarisms and pointed profanity. This had an effect that was virtually precisely the opposite of what had been the intent. One of Rendler’s primary duties as board president was and remains to officiate over the board’s meetings, which extended, in her mind and in the minds of many others whom she respected as well as generally throughout the community, to maintaining the decorum and civility of the proceedings. Faced meeting after meeting with a bevy of individuals who engaged in ad hominem attacks laced with profanities that belittled Olson, Wilson, herself and other participants of the meetings who had voiced support for Olson’s and Wilson’s proposals and unable to curb their vitriol, intemperance and disrespect, Rendler grew frustrated and angry. The continuous efforts of the left-leaning contingent of participants at the meetings to disrupt the meetings and circusify their atmosphere was indignity she was unable to bear. It was that disparagement her substance and value as an elected official by those who were among the most vocal of the city’s liberal vanguard that influenced her with regard to the Olson’s and Wilson’s proposals and forced her, ineluctably, into an alliance with them.
As the board considered and voted on each of two initiatives – one in April expressing opposition to transgender athletes competing on teams that align with their gender identity; another in July that banned all flags from classrooms except for the American flag, the California state flag, and military flags – Rendler supported Olson and Wilson.
In June, before the flag policy was settled upon, the school board had simultaneously taken up a book policy, which had followed up on 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. At the same June meeting when the board had given the first of two required passages of the flag policy, it took up the explicit/obscene book and material removal proposal. At that meeting, the board by an identical 3-to-2 margin gave a first reading or preliminary passage to a policy mandating that any book challenged for containing “perceived pornography, erotica, graphic descriptions or depictions of sexual acts, and/or sexual violence, or sexually explicit materials” be removed from school libraries within three business days
At the board’s July 8 meeting it was scheduled to give second reading and final passage to both the flag and book policies. While the flag policy was adopted that night, accusations of censorship were flung about with unfavorable comparisons to the German Student Union, the National Socialist German Students League, Joseph Goebbels, the Inquisition, Pope Lucius III and Girolamo Savonarola. While Olson and Wilson weathered those aspersions, Rendler appeared to be wounded by them. Simultaneously, 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, 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.
After a month’s delay the matter came before the board in August.
The proposed book challenging and banning policy was refined during that interlude. What was firmed up was that 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. Books are to be rated 0 to 35 in terms of sexual explicity. Those at 10 or below would be allowed to remain on the district’s bookshelves. Those between 11 and 30 would be subject to discretionary exclusion from the district’s libraries and classrooms. Those at 30 and above would be automatically removed.
On August 5, the board gave a 3-to-2 approval of the policy. It was brought before the board for a second reading and final passage on August 19.
At that board meeting, Olson defended the proposal as a preventative policy which would protect students from sexually explicit books, examples of which, she said were at that point available in Redlands school libraries. Exposing impressionable youths to that kind of material was tantamount to sexual abuse and qualified, she said, as grooming, which would leave at least some of the district’s students vulnerable “to predators who wish to abuse them.”
Ayala-Quintero and Holohan opposed the policy from top to bottom. Ayala-Quintero maintained that Wilson and Olson were advocating on behalf of parents who were close-mindeldy conservative just as they are but were ignoring the wishes of a greater number of enlightened parents who are intent on their children being exposed to a broader range of ideas and concepts. She said that those parents who want to limit their children’s exposure to provocative materials and books should and do have the right to do just that but that they should not be allowed to dictate the parameters of what other parents deem acceptable and appropriate for their children.
Ayala-Quintero said the policy would intrude on the rights of more liberal-minded parents as well as on the rights of their children.
Ayala-Quintero said the policy would entail a cost, as holding the hearings to determine whether the books were obscene would cost money.
At any rate, Ayala-Quintero insisted, the district already had librarians who were doing a good job of screening what reading materials are available to the district’s students.
“We don’t have pornography in our curriculum,” Ayala-Quintero said, and she lampooned the “narrative that we teach our students to have oral sex” as deliberately misleading “rumors.”
Books which Awaken Redlands has in its cross hairs as being obscene and pornographic, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Stephen Chbosky’s “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Gustave Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil, Patricia McCormick’s “Sold” by Patricia McCormick and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer also have redeeming social and cultural value, those who oppose Wilson and Olson say.
The policy is one that defies Assembly Bill 1078, which was authored by Assemblyman Corey Jackson and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2023 and prohibits the censorship of books, the policy’s opponents maintain.
Under the policy, if a book is “perceived” as sexually explicit by a member of the public, it will be removed within three days and subject to a school board hearing within 45 days.
After the report comes in, a district review committee comprised of the superintendent, assistant superintendent of educational services and the director of elementary or secondary education will have two months to read and review the book using the rubric.
Olson, Wilson and Rendler are prejudiced against homosexuals and intent on marginalizing and demonizing the LGBTQ+ community, their political opponents maintain. The three will use the power of censorship the policy provides to ban materials that a accepting of alternative lifestyles, those opposing the policy say.
The board majority of Rendler, Olson and Wilson are intelligent enough nor socially sophisticated enough to make decisions on behalf of the community, Katherine Hayes, a former substitute teacher in the district, said.
Trisha Keeling, the executive director of Together for Redlands, accused the board majority of engaging in “book banning,” which she opined “has no place in Redlands Unified.”
The Reverend Cheryl Raine, said, “Banning books gives us silence when we need speech, closes ears when we need to listen and makes us blind when we need to see,” Raine said.
When the time of a vote came, Rendler said it was her judgment that the policy was not an attempt to ban books but an effort to be responsible. She said children should not be subject to sexually explicit or obscene material and that the board must continue to provide a safe learning environment.
“From the time that I was appointed to this board, I have consistently supported keeping sexually explicit books out of our libraries and classrooms, and I’m still of the conviction that children should not be subjected to this material,” Rendler said.

The policy was adopted on a 3-to-2 vote, with Olson, Rendler and Wilson prevailing and Ayala-Quintero and Holhan dissenting. At once, a voice above the din pronounced Rendler, Wilson and Olson to be “frigid, middle-aged hags” who are “bigots on a crusade of disgrace.” A chorus of those present cried “shame” at the board’s “fascistic plan.” Thereafter, another syncopated chant was heard: “Candy resign Olson resign Candy resign Olson resign Candy resign Olson resign.”