It appears that the Christian traditionalist reform movement that had taken root with two of San Bernardino County’s seven largest school districts has been stifled by this year’s election.
The defeat of school board candidates in the Chino Valley and Redlands school districts who were standard bearers of the conservative movement has arrested, at least temporarily, a wave that some of those who support the reimposition of the conservative social and moral values that predominated within the California public school system during much of the 20th Century which were championed by San Bernardino County’s own Max Rafferty were hopeful would spread to three or four of the county’s 23 other school districts.
The California Teachers Association, the bargaining unit for the vast majority of California’s Kindergarten-through-12th grade teachers, is widely recognized for having a liberal to progressive political orientation and a close strategic alignment with the Democratic Party. That union’s support of successful candidates for California Superintendent of Public Education has resulted in, or dovetailed with, the generally liberal orientation of the vast majority of those employed with the state’s educational system.
This has resulted in the acceptance of homosexual lifestyles by teachers and school administrators to the extent that the display of gay pride symbology, standards and flags was tolerated or encouraged, the widespread availability of books and texts with homosexual themes and content depicting homosexuality, celebrating it and seeking to normalize it in school libraries and the tolerance for transsexualism within school settings. In the last instance, circumstances had evolved by 2020 in which school districts throughout the state were required to provide, without informing parents, on junior high school and high school campuses “gender‑neutral changing rooms” in which students who left home in the attire deemed appropriate for the gender they were assigned at birth could don clothes normally worn by members of the opposite gender to wear while at school and change back into the clothes they had left home in that morning before returning home. California schools had adopted a policy, without informing parents, of accepting, during school hours, whatever gender identification and name students assumed for themselves at school and to honor the students’ requests that they be able to keep their parents from knowing about their on-campus reorientation.
Prayer in American schools in general has been banned essentially since the 1960s.
In 2006, Sylvia Orozco, a parishioner at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills was elected to the Chino Valley School Board. In 2008, another Calvary Chapel congregant, James Na, was elected to the school board.
Shortly thereafter, Orozco and Na began to act in conformance with the dictums of the pastor at Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, Jack Hibbs. A denominationalist, Hibbs holds that Christians have a duty to stand up for their beliefs by either running for election to public office themselves or supporting other Christians who do run, and then, upon taking office, Christianize public policy. With Hibbs encouraged the members of Calvary Chapel and other churches to turn out for elections.
After Orozco and Na were in place, Hibbs choreographed requests that the Chino Valley Unified School District make Bible study part of the district curriculum. The district did so in 2010.
In 2012, Andrew Cruz, another member of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills Congregation, was elected to the school board. With the religious trifecta of Orozco, Na and Cruz in place and in control of the district, there followed increasingly bold efforts to insert conservative Christian activism into the district’s educational curriculum. Without any official passage of policy but rather simply by doing so, the board began including benedictions at the beginning of the school board meetings. It then moved toward allowing school prayer.
This religiosity in a public forum was challenged by 23 parents of some of the district’s students, who in 2014 were represented by the Madison, Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation in a suit filed in Federal Court in Riverside against the district. The suit resulted in a U.S. District Court Judge Jesus Bernal in 2016 issuing a ruling, later upheld on appeal, that the district desist in evangelism, extending to so-called Christian witnessing as well as “prayers, Bible readings and proselytizing” in school settings. The legal battle with the Freedom From Religion Foundation over the prayer issue resulted in the district sustaining a ruling that it needed to cover the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s $282,602 legal costs in addition to the district’s payments to its own attorneys. Members of the Christian traditionalist reform movement, nevertheless, considered the expenditures the district made in fighting the good fight at reforming school district policy to be money well spent.
Orozco in 2018 left the school board to engage in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to be elected to the Chino City Council, which temporarily returned the school district to secular control. In 2022, however, two other members of Calvery Chapel Chino Hills, Sonja Shaw and Jon Monroe, were elected to the Chino Valley School Board. Upon elevating Shaw to the position of school board president. The four-person ruling coalition of Shaw, Na, Cruz and Monroe embarked on an effort to acculturate public education in Chino Valley in accordance with Christian principles.
In 2023, the Chino Valley Unified School District, on the strength of a vote by Shaw, Na, Cruz and Monroe, adopted a parental notification policy requiring teachers to inform parents of any student who reidentified his or her gender at school from the gender indicated on his or her birth certificate in a classroom setting. This ran counter to the advisal and recommended policy advocated by the California Department of Education and the state’s prevailing political establishment,
The California Attorney General’s Officer filed a civil suit in San Bernardino County Superior Court to enjoin the Chino Valley Unified School District from enforcing its parental notification policy, asserting the policy “puts transgender and gender nonconforming students in danger of imminent, irreparable harm from the consequences of forced disclosures” and that as a consequence of the school district action, such students were “under threat’’ and “in fear,” facing “the risk of emotional, physical, and psychological harm from non-affirming or unaccepting parents or guardians.” The challenge of the policy was upheld by San Bernardino County Superior Court. Furthermore, the California legislature passed AB 1955, prohibiting schools from making a practice of notifying parents if their children are assuming a gender different from the one assigned them at birth. Immediately after it was signed into law by Governor Newsom on July 15, 2024, the Chino Valley Unified School District and eight parents of district students, represented by attorney Emily Ray of the Austin, Texas-based Liberty Justice Center, sued Newsom, Bonta and Thurmond in an effort to prevent the enforcement of AB 1955.

As that legal back-and-forth was raging in state court, another civil lawsuit, Mirabelli vs. Olson, relating to two teachers in the Escondido School District suing the district in which they worked over that district’s order that they not inform the parents of their students about the names they used in a classroom setting when those names reflected a difference from those students’ biological gender, was wending its way through federal court. Ultimately, in Mirabelli vs. Olson, Judge Roger Benitez ruled that a school district or educators to whom parents have entrusted their children cannot actively deceive those parents.
In March, the U.S. Supreme Court majority ruled that parents who made inquiries with regard to the issue had a right to be told about their children’s sexual orientation presentation at school.
As federal law takes precedence over state law, the Chino Unified School District, which had taken a shellacking in California state court in seeking to propound its conservative vision in the context of classroom education, found itself vindicated in fighting what many considered to be the excessively liberal philosophy of the predominant number of professional educators who had taken over the California public school system.
Meanwhile. In the Redlands Unified School District, for decades, as was the case in the vast majority of school districts throughout California, the liberalism of the California Teachers Association’s approach to education had been the watchword. In 2024, however two of the school board’s four-person liberal-leaning ruling majority were replaced 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 that year’s election season.
What was anticipated was that the city’s liberals would reach out to Board Member Michelle Rendler, the lone centrist on the panel, to see if she could be brought into an alignment with the board’s two progressives, Patty Hollohan and Melissa Ayala-Quintero to ensure that the district would continue to adhere to the value system and policies favored by the State of California’s current educational establishment. 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, in a series of politically tone-deaf gyrations, pressed both personal and deliberative attacks, in some case using vulgar and pointed terms, against Rendler.
Ultimately, Rendler found herself thrown rightward, essentially into the Olson’s and Wilson’s camp. This enabled Olson and Wilson and their supporters to achieve changes with regard to district policy that would not have been possible merely on the strength of their two votes alone
Olson and Wilson, joined by Rendler, who had been elevated to the position of board president, passed several policies aligned with conservative positions on education, curriculum, and student conduct. These measures were supported by the “conservative” faction and considered anathema to the values of the district’s more progressive trustees, who therefore opposed them. Olson, Wilson and Rendler, approved a book removal policy allowing the board to appoint a committee to review and remove materials deemed “pervasively pornographic,” “sexually explicit” or “blasphemous.” These restrictions extended to textbooks and instructional materials used in classrooms and libraries, not just library books. The board troika passed a ban on obscene material in classrooms without a precise definition, which was criticized by opponents as vague and potentially censorious. The board majority also put into place restrictions on flag displays, limiting classroom flag displays to the U.S. flag, California flag, and U.S. military flags. This effectively removed lesbian/gay/bisexual/transsexual/queer and pride flags and other non-traditional symbols which had previously been present in classrooms and elsewhere on district campuses. In a 3-to-2 vote with Olson, Wilson and Rendler prevailing, the board passed a rule that prevented transgender girls – i.e., students who had begun life as males or who had male genitalia – from competing in girls’ sports, citing “fairness” and “scientific” distinctions between sexes.
The board, with Olson, Wilson and Rendler in ascendancy sought to limit what was referred to as “political or philosophical ideology” in the schools curriculum, in particular calling for an end to open endorsement of gender transition and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transexual/queer identities in school materials and activities.
Olson and Wilson explored the concept of a parental notification requirement for students assuming a gender different from their biological sex, similar to what had been undertaken by the Chino Valley Unified School District. That action was deferred, pending further refinement and discussion.
As the Chino Valley School District’s leader, Shaw found herself lionized as a heroine by many of those in the conservative movement at the national level as controversy over the proliferation of gender altering surgical procedures being performed on underage subjects was raging in the early 2020s.
She parlayed that notoriety into a run for California superintendent of public education.
Shaw hit her high water mark when in the June 2026 Primary, she capture first place in the superintendent of public instruction.
She pushed full speed ahead in her crusade to put herself into position to moderate the state’s liberal education policies. Doing so, however, required that she not seek reelection to the Chino Valley Unified School Board, where she represents Governing Board Area 3. Instead, moving to hopefully fill that eventual gap was her husband, Chris Shaw.
Also up for election this year was another board seat, the one representing Governing Board Area 4 that was captured by Monroe in 2022. Monroe provided votes of support right down the line with regard to the traditionalist conservative Christian values Shaw, Na and Cruz were advocating. He however, resigned his board post to move to Utah, and was replaced last year by Shaun Smith, who is likewise ideologically aligned with Shaw.
Eastward across the county in Redlands, Holohan, the longest serving member on the Redlands Unified School District Board and the model of a New Age liberal, ran in this year’s Governing Board Area 1 contest. Rendler, the school board president whose politics put her in the middle of the road until vitriolic attacks on her shoved her into an alliance with Olson and Wilson, was due to seek reelection this year. She opted against doing so.
In this way, the outcome of Tuesday’s election with regard to the Chino Valley Unified and Redlands Unified is at the very least a bellwethers with regard to the rightward progression of educational politics in California.
In San Bernardino County, the Chino Valley Unified School District is the third largest public school district ranked by student enrollment, with 26.562 pupils, behind Fontana Unified with 31,958 students and San Bernardino City Unified, with 48,078 enrollees.
Competing against Chris Shaw in Governing Board District 3 is Frank Gerdine, who falls on the progressive side of the political spectrum. As of today, at 5:31 p.m., Gerdine, with 5,227 or 57.47 percent of the total 9,095 votes cast and counted in the district, is leading Chris Shaw, who has 3,868 votes or 42.53 percent.
In Chino Valley Unified Governing District 4, Smith’s effort to hang onto the post he was appointed to in order to carry on with the conservative agenda following Monroe’s exit last year is experiencing equally rough sledding. As of today, at 5:31 p.m., he has collected 4,222 votes or 42.86 percent of the 9,851 cast in the district and counted so far, which is well off the pace set by the progressive candidate also running in District 4, Meaghan Lichthart, with 6,629 votes or 57.14 percent. .
In the California Superintendent of Public Schools race, as of late this afternoon, Friday November 6, Richard Barrera, the Democrat in the race, is besting Sonja Shaw, a Republican with 4,095,752 votes or 57.7 percent to her 4,095,752 votes or 42.3 percent.
While these results have not closed the conservative majority on the school board out entirely, since Na and Cruz as well as another nominal conservative – John Cervantes – remain in place, Sonja Shaw’s pursuit of the superintendent of public instruction effort has sacrificed her hold on the District 3 seat and did not succeed in effectuating the systemic change the state’s outnumbered and politically outmuscled conservative forces were hoping for.
In the Redlands Unified School Board race, Holohan was up against Dr. Dale Broome, who has made no bones about his support for Olson and Wilson, and that if he were elected, he would solidify the victories the conservative faction has been scoring over the last 22 months. That does not appear to be in the cards, however. As of today, at 5:31 p.m., Holohan had claimed 5.903 or 56.42 percent of the votes from Governing Board Area 1 that have been counted, while Broome has chalked up 4,560 voter endorsements or 43.58 percent.
In the race to replace Rendler, the conservatives were backing Maria Montes. She, however, polled 1,865 votes or 31.93 percent, not enough to prevent Ryan Schavrien, an avowed progressive, from claiming first place with 3.275 votes or 56.07 percent. Running in third was Riara Richardson, with 701 votes or 12 percent.
-Mark Gutglueck