Twenty-six months after the Chris Mann managerial era in Yucaipa began inauspiciously and controversially, it closed out this week with the city council agreeing to pay him $279,045 to go away with no further adieu.
Mann on January 9, 2023 was brought in to replace his predecessor, Ray Casey, after the latter was forced into tendering his resignation less than three months after his contract to oversee municipal operations in the city had been extended for 20 some months in October 2022.
The secretiveness that had been maintained by the council troika that held a figurative gun to Casey’s head to induce him to voluntarily step down – then-Mayor/District 5 Councilman Justin Beaver, District 3 Councilman Bobby Duncan and the then-recently elected and installed District 1 Councilman Matt Garner – gave rise to tremendous distrust of City Hall among a substantial cross section of Yucaipa’s citizenry thereafter. As a consequence efforts to recall Beaver, Duncan and Garner ensued, which Mann took extraordinary efforts to derail.
Those efforts included moving the woman who had been serving as the city clerk, Kimberly Metzler, out of that role and putting Ana Sauseda, the city clerk who had worked with him in Canyon Lake where he was previously city manager, into her place. Thereafter, Sauseda used her authority as city clerk to file suit against the recall petitioners based on what she claimed were but which a judge later ruled were not misrepresentations with regard to Beaver’s, Duncan’s and Garner’s actions in deposing Casey. Mann facilitated Sauseda hiring, at city taxpayer expense, a Los Angeles-based law firm to pursue that litigation against the 194 Yucaipa residents who had signed the documents to undertake the ciruculation of a petition to initiate the recall of Beaver, Duncan and Garner. Ultimately, that law firm would bill taxpayers an unknown amount of money reported to be in excess of $1.5 million which Beaver, Duncan, Garner, Mann and Sauseda were too embarrassed to quantify and which has therefore remained hidden. In addition, taxpayers were on the hook for a likewise unquantified amount of money in the form of the legal fees of those citizens who contested the lawsuit Sauseda brought against them and which failed.
While that lawsuit succeeded in stymieing the 2023 recall effort against Beaver, Duncan and Garner, in 2024, a contingent of District 1 residents succeeded in reviving the recall attempt against Garner and succeeded in removing him from office in the November 2024 election. Duncan, faced with the enmity of a significant number of his District 3 constituents over his removal of Casey, chose not to seek reelection in the November 2024 election and left office in December 2024. Beaver braved the passionate sentiment against him over the Casey ambush and managed to garner enough support among District 5’s voters to be returned to office. He remains winged and wounded, however, with many of the city’s residents, both in his district and in the other four districts, suspecting or convinced that he is on the take.
One of the reasons that a goodly number of Yucaipa residents are of the impression that what is now perceived as the Casey sacking/Mann hiring debacle involved graft is based on the differing orientations toward governance that Casey and Mann embodied.
Casey was a Princeton graduate, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering, Casey worked in the private sector for nine years as a consulting engineer and as a construction company project manager, thereafter working in the public sector as the principal engineer in the City of Temecula’s land development department, as the highway engineer and road commission manager for the Isabella County Road Commission in Michigan, the development services deputy director and city engineer for the City of San Bernardino and then Yucaipa’s city engineer for five years before he was elevated to Yucaipa city manager in 2008. During his more than 14 years as city manager, Casey had evinced, based in large measure on his expertise as a civil engineer, an understanding that any incoming development had to be matched with adequate infrastructure, the cost for which had to be defrayed either by the developer or the city’s taxpayers. In his role as city manager, Casey demonstrated that he was capable of serving as not only an honest broker between pro-development and anti-development forces and sentiments within the community but advocating for and insisting that project proponents be financially responsible for the infrastructure and off-site improvements that must accompany their development efforts.
Mann, on the other hand, while having experience in government at both the elected and staff levels, was nonetheless a creature of the private sector that coordinates with and is regulated by government it its effort to turn a profit in large measure at the expense of, or added expense to, taxpayers. After obtaining his four-year college degree from California Lutheran University, Mann in 1999, at the age of 23 was elected to the West Lake Village City Council. He parlayed what he had learned about the political and governmental processes during his time in that role to mastering how those dealing with government as an applicant – for a job, for a contract supplying goods, for a contract supplying services, for a franchise or, most significantly, for approval of a development project – can present themselves in a way and deal with the bureaucrats serving as analysts, processors, regulators, deputy administrators, administrators and department heads that will get that application approved.
In 2005, Mann founded Mann Communications, which according to the company’s website functions in the main as a representative of developers and development interests seeking to move building proposals past the planning process and get them approved. Mann Communications specializes in, according to the firm’s website, making sure that “elected officials are… provided the political cover they need in order to support good projects” to “provide our clients with a wealth of knowledge and experience and a winning approach to land use entitlement.”
To ensure his commitment to these development initiatives, according to the Mann Communications website, Mann took an ownership stake in the projects being pursued, which technically made him a developer himself.
“Mann Communications Principal Chris Mann has been an active partner in numerous development projects in California, Nevada and Arizona,” the Mann Communications website states. “Having worked both as an elected official and as a developer, he uniquely understands the development process from both the public and private perspectives. Understanding the practices and motivations of each side better than most, he is able to provide tremendous value to the entire development process, making Mann Communications an invaluable member of any project team.”
Highly troubling to many Yucaipa residents was that Mann, even as he was working as the city manager of Canyon Lake, overseeing the regulatory process of that city’s land use decision-making and planning functions was simultaneously working for and accepting money from developmental interests, the very entities he was supposed to be regulating. Yucaipa residents needed to go no further than Mann Communications’ website to glimpse those development interests – residential developers Lennar, Pardee, Meritage Homes and Richmond American, builders Holland Development, Jacobsen Family Holdings, Turner Dale, Rotkin Real Estate Group, Carlton Properties and AES Corporation, Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, Inc., Clear Channel Outdoor, BrightSource, Preferred Business Properties Real Estate Services, Beaumont Garden Center, Passantino Andersen, Robertson’s Cement, Oakmont Industrial Group, The Golshan Group and Desmond & Louis Incorporated. Many of those companies had intentions of pursuing projects in Yucaipa.
It was not lost on a wide cross section of Yucaipa residents that Duncan was a real estate agent. Previously, on a city council made up of individuals embodying a variety professional classes, allowing the real estate industry a seat at the table was not perceived as being problematic. What it looked like at that point, however, was that Duncan had put Mann in place to boost the prospect of more and more development in Yucaipa, in turn increasing his ability to sell houses and make money.
At the same time, Garner was the partner in a building materials company which did over $4 billion in business per year, by which he had a stake in the city being more accommodating toward development.
The specter of Casey’s force exit hung over the city, and there was a perception that Beaver, Duncan and Garner had ditched him in favor of Mann, who would have the city adopt an absolute open-door planning and development process by which the city’s largely rural nature would come under increasing threat and the balance that had long been maintained between its Old West, worldly, agricultural, mercantile, semi-rural and urban influences was to be discarded and replaced by subdivision after subdivision that would make Yucaipa indistinguishable from scores or even hundreds of other cities in Southern California that are now composed, practically, of wall-to-wall houses.
Uncharitable word spread to the effect that Beaver, Duncan and Garner were in the pocket of the development industry and taking money, either directly or indirectly, from the building industry or as a consequence of its success, if not in envelopes stuffed with greenbacks passed under the table at a local eatery then in some other form in which the money was laundered as checks or payments for some innocent-seeming service never actually rendered or goods never delivered or in some other creatively hidden form or favor whereby a family member was employed or provided with a stipend or item of value that had not been legitimately earned.
Over the last two years, the anger at what the council majority had done on January 9, 2023 never diffused. The San Bernardino County Civil Grand Jury looked into the matter pertaining to Casey’s displacement followed by Mann’s hiring, concluding that “the Yucaipa City Council has developed a reputation among many residents of ignoring the concerns of the public and of fostering an atmosphere of mistrust, disdain, anger, resentment, lack of transparency and appearances of conflicts of interest.”
With the removal of Garner from the city council as a consequence of the District 1 recall vote during the November 5, 2025 election and Duncan foregoing participating as a candidate for reelection in the same, whereby Judy Woolsey was elected in a close three-way vote to replace him, with the installation of the council in December 2024, only one of the council members who had prevailed in the January 9, 2023 vote to accept Casey’s resignation remained on the council dais. Because of the confidentiality that attends public decisions with regard to public agency personnel issues, the newly composed council was unable to make open utterances with regard to its intention with regard to who is to occupy the executive suite at Yucaipa City Hall. Moreover, a provision in the Yucaipa City Code prohibits the city council from terminating the city manager for 90 days following a city council election. Thus, the council was not in a position to sack Mann prior to 8.pm on February 3. Consequently, the city council, which had been augmented in December with Bob Miller as an appointee to replace the recalled Garner, on February 10 undertook a closed door evaluation of Mann’s performance as city manager along with that of City Attorney Steven Graham, who also goes by the name Steven Pacifico. Mayor Thorp, while making no mention of Mann after the city council adjourned into its February 10 public session following its closed door meeting, stated that the council was directing staff to put out a request for proposals with a 30-day timeframe for city council attorney candidates.
The agenda for the city council’s February 24 meeting indicated that the evaluation of Mann’s performance was yet ongoing and that the council was in the process of negotiating with Mann over the terms of an extension of his contract to serve as city manager. While the public, or a portion thereof, had the impression that those discussions involved coming to a determination of what sort of salary and order of benefits Mann was to receive to remain as city manager, what in fact was taking place was a discussion between the council and Mann about what the terms of his departure were to be. At issue, apparently, was whether the council as it is now composed had the stomach to terminate Mann citing cause, in which case it would need confer nothing – neither a full year’s salary as stipulated under his contract if he were to be dismissed without cause or a severance package – or whether it would let him go without citing cause, in which case it would need to provide him with a full year’s salary, which at this point amounts $233,535.92.
A decision was reached to not cite cause in terminating him, after which the council and Mann hashed out a separation agreement in which he is to forego his right to being paid the $233,535.92.in salary he would otherwise be due and both he and the city are to mutually hold each other harmless with regard to his serving as city manager, his departure or the situation or circumstances with regard to both in exchange for a one-time $279,045 payout as well as one year of health benefits for Mann and his family.
His official date of departure is on March 31. Reports are that he had begun clearing out his office at Yucaipa City Hall over the weekend of March 8-9. Reportedly, the termination agreement was finalized on March 10.
Mann leaving the employ of the city after working slightly more than two years means he will not reach the milestone of five years with the city, at which point he would have qualified for lifetime medical benefits for himself and his dependents.
The roughly two years and one one month that Mann served as city manager is now being referred to by several Yucaipans as a “managerial cul-de-sac.” That dead end, which began with Mann and ended with Mann and providing no continuity between Casey and whoever is to succeed Mann, has cost the city in excess, it is estimated, of $2 million that otherwise would not have been spent. This includes a redundancy of $720,497.33 consisting of the $441,452.33 paid to Ray Casey to buy out the last 17 months, 3 weeks and one day on his contract ending on June 30, 2024 following his January 9, 2023 departure from the city and the $279,045 payout to Chris Mann agreed to this week.
That does not include the money paid to Sauseda to take on her role as city clerk, consisting of $160,219.64 in total annual compensation paid to her in 2023 and $181,909.47 in total annual compensation paid to her in 2024, when Metzler was already functioning in that role, nor the $160,224.96 in total annual compensation paid to Joe Pradetto in 2023 and $182,051.79 in total annual compensation to serve in the role of director of governmental affairs and public information officer in 2024 when there were no such positions on the Yucaipa staff before Mann arrived. Nor does that include the money paid out by the city to pay for the Sutton law firm’s legal services relating to the lawsuit Sauseda filed against 193 of the city’s residents and the payouts to cover the legal fees of Yucaipa residents George Sardeson, Steven C. Maurer, Sherilyn Long, Robert Huddleston, Wanda Huddleston, Jeanette Livolsi McKovich, James A. McKovich, Jay S. Bogh, Kari L. Bogh, Kathy Sellers and Colleen Wang, when they contested Sauseda’s lawsuit. All told, it appears that the city council majority’s move to get rid of Casey and replace him with Mann has cost the city at least $2.3 million and perhaps as much as $2.8 million.
The entity that grew out of the reaction to the Casey sacking/Mann hiring, Save Yucaipa, proved far more resilient than Beaver, Duncan, Garner, Mann, Graham/Pacifico, Sauseda, Pradetto or the members of the Sutton Law Firm anticipated. The recall effort to oust Beaver, Duncan and Garner was not expected. It was thought that Sauseda’s lawsuit would not simply obstruct the recall effort but convince those participating in it to desist in any further political activism. While the suit brought on Sauseda’s behalf by the Sutton Law Firm succeeded in thwarting the original recall effort, it did not prevent the contingent of city residents, working under the auspices of Save Yucaipa, from reviving the recall effort against Garner and removing him from office. Nor did Mann’s machinations and Sauseda’s lawsuit prevent Save Yucaipa and its members from convincing Duncan to bug out of seeking reelection in 2024. Save Yucaipa’s members did not desist in their activism following the 2024 election, maintaining pressure on the city council, despite Beaver’s reelection to it, to end the city’s relationship with Mann.
Now that the current council has, at some expense, made a break with Mann, Save Yucaipa members are hopeful that the council will purge the city of any remaining vestiges of the Mann administration, extending to, as one of its leading members put it, acting “to sever ties and cut off dead limbs, including Sauseda and Pradetto. We’re hopeful they’re next to go.”

Pradetto told the Sentinel that it was acknowledged during the recent performance evaluation of the city manager that “Chris Mann has successfully achieved every goal the city council established for him and for the organization.”
Still, Pradetto said, “At this time, both the city council and Chris Mann agree that a leadership transition is in the best interest of the city’s future. As part of this transition, the city and Chris Mann have signed a negotiated separation agreement. The city council expresses its appreciation for Chris Mann’s service and wishes him well in his future endeavors. While his role as city manager will conclude at the end of this month, Chris and his family will continue to be valued members of the Yucaipa community. The City Council remains committed to ensuring a smooth transition and will begin the process of recruiting a new city manager to continue the important work of serving Yucaipa residents.”

Events in the Chino Valley Unified School District over the last two-and-a-half years have had, at the least, a subtle impact on the state’s educational landscape. Now, the district’s board president is looking to intensify the influence the trends she and her colleagues who make up that board majority have had to effectuate deeper impacts on the learning atmosphere in public school settings throughout California.
Republican Sonja Shaw, who was made president of the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Trustees shortly after she was elected to the board in 2022 by defeating Democrat Christine Gagnier, has now set her sights on running for the position of California state superintendent of public instruction next year.
Elections within the Chino Valley Unified School District for more than a decade and a half have served as a forum in which the fundamentalist Christian/Republican right wing movement has successfully asserted itself in the Golden State, or at least a portion thereof.
At the epicenter of that movement is the Reverend Jack Hibbs, the founder and pastor of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills. Hibbs is a denominationalist who holds that Christians have a duty to take over public office and promote their religious beliefs. While he has not expended too much energy or effort on applying his philosophy or approach at the national, state, county or municipal level, he has concentrated his political firepower on the governance of the public school system in the geographical area at the extreme southwest end of San Bernardino County, i.e., the Chino Valley Unified School District, which blankets Chino, Chino Hills and the connecting and immediately surrounding unincorporated county areas.
Hibb’s first political success came with the 2006 election of Sylvia Orozco, a Calvary Chapel parishioner, to the school board. Hibbs followed this with the 2008 election of another Calvary Chapel parishioner, James Na. In 2012, a third member of Hibbs’ congregation, Andrew Cruz, was elected to the school board. Cruz, Na and Orozco, representing a religious trifecta that constituted a majority on the board, set about making significant inroads on the district’s policies.
A major milestone in this regard was making Bible study part of the district curriculum, as well as including benedictions at the beginning of the school board meetings and later, after Na became board president, outright evangelism from the district board dais, with Na telling those present at meetings that they should seek out Jesus Christ as their personal savior.
When the district began to move toward including daily prayer as part of basic instruction at the district’s schools, the Freedom From Religion Foundation of Madison, Wisconsin in 2014 stepped in and filed suit in Federal Court in Riverside against the district on behalf of two named plaintiffs, Larry Maldonado and Mike Anderson, and 21 unnamed plaintiffs who asserted they were alienated or intimidated at school board meetings because of the insistence of some district officials to engage in so-called Christian witnessing, including “prayers, Bible readings and proselytizing.”
A ruling on the Freedom From Religion Foundation lawsuit by Federal Judge Jesus Bernal resulted in overt religiosity and proselytizing within the district’s schools being eliminated. In 2018, Orozco did not seek reelection and Christina Gagnier and Joe Schaffer were elected and thereafter joined with Board Member Irene Hernandez-Blair to form a board majority that countered Na and Cruz.
For some four years, the denominationalists in the Chino Unified School District were, or appeared to be, in eclipse. In the 2020 election Cruz and Na had been returned to office and Hernandez-Blair did not seek reelection. She was replaced by Don Bridge, who was as committed as was Hernandez-Blair to preventing a religious takeover of Chino Valley’s public schools.
Gagnier, an attorney, had aspirations of moving on to higher office, such as the state legislature and/or Congress. A politician in the mold of Congresswoman Katie Hill or Palm Springs Mayor Christy Holstege, Gagnier had the backing not only of local Democrats but those at the state and national levels, and she was a particular darling of the progressive establishment. She was being groomed to move up to Sacramento in conformance with the strictures of California’s term limits, from which perch she was to eventually launch her run for Congress. This plan was contingent upon her maintaining her status as an officeholder. In 2022, the Democrats, as the dominant party in Sacramento, joined forces to assist her in hanging onto her incumbency. California Superintendent of Public Schools Tony Thurmond, formerly a Bay Area assemblyman, was prominent among the Democrats campaigning on her behalf.
Despite the Democrats pulling out all, or most, of the stops in the effort to keep Gagnier in office, she ran head-on into Hibbs’ denominationalist political machine, which was militating to recapture the high ground it had occupied until the combination of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Judge Bernal, Hernandez-Blair, Gagnier and Schaffer had knocked all of he wind out of their sails. The 2022 election did not go the Democrats way in the 2022 Chino Valley Unified School District election. Two further members of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills congregation, Sonja Shaw and Republican Central Committee Member Jon Monroe, proved victorious, displacing Gagnier and Schaffer on the board.
Shaw was in short order established as the board president. She and Monroe examined the district landscape and were particularly troubled by the district’s provision of “safe space,” consisting of individual locker rooms in which students were allowed to change out of the clothes they had left home in which were appropriate for their biological gender and don clothes associated with the gender identity they maintained at school, if it were different, and then reverse the process before returning home. The district’s policy, in conformance with Gagnier’s, Schaffer’s, Hernandez-Blair’s and Bridge’s direction as board members, was that Chino’s schools, faculty, teachers and employees refrain from informing the parents of those students who were reidentifying their gender that they were doing so.
A little more than seven months after Shaw and Monroe were installed as board members, they voted along with Na and Cruz to change the district’s policy to require that parents of a student who reidentified his or her gender at school from the gender indicated on his or her birth certificate be informed of reidentification their child had made. Prior to the board’s July 20, 2023 decision on that matter, a vote in which Bridge dissented, California Attorney General Rob Bonta wrote a letter to the district opposing the policy change and vowing legal efforts to overturn it or prevent it if it were passed. California Superintendent of Schools Tony Thurmond sojourned to Chino the day of the vote to personally speak out against the policy change. Both Bonta and Thurmond emphasized their belief that the new policy would submit students to traumatic emotional, psychological and perhaps even physical abuse by parents who were unaccepting of their offsprings’ gender transformations.
During the July 20, 2023 school board meeting, while Thurmond was in the midst of his remarks, Shaw had the microphone to the podium cut off when he reached the one-minute speaking time limit, reduced from the normal three minutes, that had been imposed that evening because of the overflow crowd and the large number of speakers present. Shaw had district security escort Thurmond out of the meeting when he protested.
In the aftermath of Chino Valley Unified’s groundbreaking action, multiple other school districts passed identical or similar policies.
A month later, just as the 2023-24 academic year was about to begin, Bonta, in his capacity as attorney general, filed suit in San Bernardino County Superior Court to enjoin the district from enforcing its policy.
Bonta asserted that 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 policy, according to the attorney general “unlawfully discriminates against transgender and gender nonconforming students, subjecting them to disparate treatment, harassment, and abuse, mental, emotional, and physical.”
In justifying his action, Bonta said, “This policy is destructive,” he said. “It’s discriminatory and it’s downright dangerous. It has no place in California, which is why we have moved in court to strike it down.”
Bonta asserted that the need to prevent “mental harm, emotional harm and physical harm” to those students who are products of families who are not accepting of their choice to deviate from their birth or biological gender trumps the right of all parents to be informed of their children’s sexual identity choice.
Bonta’s filing put the new policy on hold.
On September 6, 2023, San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Thomas Garza granted the State of California a temporary restraining order prohibiting the Chino Valley Unified School District from enforcing the policy.
Ultimately, the matter was transferred to the courtroom of San Bernardino County Superior Court Judge Michael Sachs. Judge Sachs, reacting to Bonta’s claim that the district’s forced disclosure provisions discriminate against transgender students who are “singled out” and that it ran afoul of California Education Code Sections 200 and 220 and Government Code section 11135 meant to ensure equal rights and opportunities for every student and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity and gender expression, perpetuated the restraining order preventing the policy’s enforcement. According to Judge Sachs, the provision of the policy requiring that faculty in essence “out” transgender students to their parents was discriminatory based on sex, violating both the California Constitution’ and U.S Constitution’s equal protection clauses.
The district and its board backed up and regrouped, and in March 2024 passed a redrafted parental notification requirement that was more general and did not make any specific mention of sexuality or gender, instead requiring that parents be told if the students made any alteration of their school registration records, such as altering their names. As most students engaging in “gender transition” adopt a name traditionally associated with the gender they are adopting, the revamped policy was inclusive of the intent contained in the policy adopted in July 2023 but maneuvered around the legal constraints Bonta, who was working in conjunction with Thurmond, California Governor Gavin Newsom and a cross section of the California legislature’s Democratic members, was attempting to construct.
Judge Sachs, in considering the district’s revamped policy, which was passed in March 2024, ruled that it was constitutionally valid and enforceable since it was not specific to sexuality or gender identification. Among the advocates of parental disclosure, this was considered a major victory.
State officials then moved to preempt parental disclosure altogether by having Assembly Member Chris Ward, D-San Diego, author 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. The bill was passed by both of California’s legislative houses and was signed into law by Governor Newsom on Monday, July 15, 2024.
Almost as soon as Governor Newsom’s signature was dry, the Chino Valley Unified School District and parents Oscar Avila, Monica Botts, Jason Craig, Kristi Hays, Cole Mann, Victor Romero, Gheorghe Rosca, Jr. and Leslie Sawyer, represented by attorney Emily Ray of the Austin, Texas-based Liberty Justice Center, sued Newsom, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond in an effort to prevent the enforcement of AB 1955.
As this legal back-and-forth has been raging in state court, a federal lawsuit, Mirabelli vs. Olson, relating to a teacher in the Escondido School District suing the district in which she worked over its order that she not inform the parents of one of her students about the name she used in a classroom setting to refer to their child, has been playing out. That case has implications that not only parallel the issues of contention between Bonta and the Chino Valley Unified School District but replicate them with some level of specificity. There have been rulings in that case by Federal Judge Roger Benitez which essentially vindicate the Chino Valley Unified School District in its intention to keep parents abreast of the activity and behavior their children engage in while in a public school setting. One [theme] in Judge Benitez’s rulings is that a school district or educators to whom parents have entrusted their children cannot be actively deceived by the district or those educators.
Within the larger context of California politics, despite the state’s voter registration overwhelmingly favoring Democrats such that all of its major constitutional officers including governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, secretary of state, treasurer, controller, superintendent of schools and insurance commissioner are Democrats and both houses of the state legislature have two-thirds Democratic majorities, polling data suggests that substantial numbers – indeed a strong majority – of parents in the state, whether they are either Democrat or Republican or non-aligned or members of the more obscure political parties, are opposed to the policy of parental nondisclosure when it comes to their children’s gender identity which has been embraced by the state’s leading Democrats such as Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta and State Superintendent of Schools Thurmond.
Thurmond, who previously served in the Assembly before he was elected state schools superintendent in 2018 and reelected in 2022, will be termed out of office as superintendent of schools following his current term. He is running for governor in 2026. At this point, twelve individuals, the majority of them Democrats, have given indication they will run for state superintendent of schools in 2026. While the superintendent of state schools is considered a nonpartisan post, party affiliation in the race has historically been a factor in who eventually prevails in the race, as in recent years campaign money in California has gravitated to serious, established Democratic politicians and officeholders.
Two of those who have cast their hats into the ring for schools superintendent are former State Senator Connie Leyva and Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, who is being termed out of California’s lower legislative house after the current term.
Both Leyva and Muratsuchi are Democrats who will need to run, during the California Primary, against a slew of other Democrats. Moreover, in the context of running for state superintendent of schools, both may be hampered by their association with liberal policies embraced by the Democrats, including opposition to parental notification. Muratsuchi, in particular, is the chairman of the Assembly Education Committee, in which post he in 2023 successfully thwarted a legislative attempt to mandate parental notification statewide.
Shaw has now leapt into the breach. Her leadership in the fight for parental notification has garnered her not only statewide but national attention, which potentially will bring to her financial backing from like-minded conservatives from throughout the country. In addition, she has affiliated herself with other conservative causes such as banning any flags in classrooms other than the U.S. and the California Bear Flag Republic, removing books with sexually explicit content from the district’s school libraries.
Shaw maintains that there is a cultural war ongoing in which critical basic American values are being threatened by liberals who have seized control of California’s governmental institutions, including the education system. She is inviting those who disagree with the cabal of radical ideologues who have come to dominate Sacramento to leave the sidelines and back her in what otherwise might be seen as a quixotic attempt to reverse what she sees as the perversion of the state’s schools.
For Shaw and her backers, an ideal elective opportunity to reverse the Democrats’ stranglehold on the statewide constitutional offices might emerge if she can get into the November 2026 general election runoff against Muratsuchi. With sufficient financing, they believe they can make an issue of Muratsuchi’s advocacy of keeping hidden from parents the details pertaining to their children’s comportment and representation of themselves in classroom settings throughout the Golden State and his accompanying assertions that the sexual orientation of their children is not something that parents have a right to know about.
“With Donald Trump attacking public education, attacking our students — especially our immigrant students and our LGBTQ+ students — now more than ever, it’s up to states like California to stand up for all of our kids,” Muratsuchi said.
In announcing her run for state superintendent of schools, Shaw said she was running “to put parents back in charge of our children’s education, not the Sacramento politicians.”
Gagnier, despite her 2022 defeat by Shaw, has now launched a bid to wrest from Republican Young Kim her hold on the seat in California’s 40th Congressional District, which stretches from southwest San Bernardino County south and west into Orange and Riverside counties, encompassing the cities of Chino Hills, Corona, Brea, Yorba Linda, Anaheim, Orange, Villa Park, Aliso Viejo, Lake Forest, Laguna Hills, Laguna Woods, Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita and Tustin, as well as the unincorporated Orange County canyon communities, Coto De Caza and North Tustin.
Gagnier, like Shaw, will be fighting an uphill battle, standing on a political foundation that features both political strengths and weaknesses.
It is noteworthy that Democrats at the state level previously saw in the Chino Valley Unified School District and the bully pulpit of its board a forum that offered what was to them a somewhat disquieting opportunity for those voices of dissent to the liberal orthodoxy that pervades Sacramento to be heard. Gagnier, an attorney by profession blessed with the photogenic quality of a Hollywood starlet and political ambition to match it, had evolved into a favorite of the Democratic establishment. Several sitting state Democratic officeholders, including Thurmond, came to Chino in the late summer and fall of 2022 to assist her in her campaign for reelection. Despite that, she was beaten by Shaw, who had the benefit of having Hibbs’ political machine behind her.
Gagnier was not out front in the liberal/Democratic efforts to promote transgender rights to the exclusion of parental rights, but she clearly falls on the Democratic side of the divide. In recent months and weeks, as she has been laying the groundwork for her 2026 congressional run against Kim, she has assiduously avoided, indeed run away from invitations to engage in, discussions of her position with regard to the transgender students rights vs. parental rights debate.
In 2014, Kim , who was then successfully running for the California Assembly, straightforwardly opposed a California law “requiring schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms of their choice and participate in sports by their gender identity rather than their anatomical gender.” While stating that transgender people “deserve to be respected,” Kim said she did not believe that lesbians, gay men, bisexuals or transsexuals individuals were innately oriented into or born with the sexual identities identities they later assumed. She said she was opposed to the law in question out of concern over how it would necessitate the construction of new school facilities, the cost of that construction. She further found troubling that students under the contemplated law would be able to change their identity “on a whim,” and that male-to-female transgender students would have an unfair advantage in sports.

Two Massive Police Responses To False Shooter Reports In Two Days

Revenge, as salami, is a dish best served up cold.
-Eugène Sue

Eleven months after officers in riot gear from multiple law enforcement agencies descended upon a ring of protesters at Pomona College and arrested 20 students, in the course of which more than a dozen were roughed up and one was hit with additional charges for fighting back, a highly-sophisticated operation was carried out this week in which the goal was to illustrate to the public the tendency of police agencies to overreact.
On March 12, 176 armed law enforcement officers from no fewer than six agencies were summoned or dispatched to Loma Linda University Medical Center after an emergency call was made to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department about a man in the throes of a mental crisis who was threatening to kill patients at the regional medical facility’s children’s hospital.
The initial call came in around 6 p.m.
The initial report was that an armed man, who had initially come into the hospital via the emergency room, had moved into the children’s hospital, where he posed a mortal threat to dozens, scores or maybe even hundreds of patients, employees and visitors.
Within less than twenty minutes, multiple media outlets and press organizations were provided with information, including alleged details about the ongoing incident to which the law enforcement agencies were privy and some details which the law enforcement agency did not have.
The man was, television, radio and newspaper reporters were told, armed with an AR-15 rifle, dressed in black, in possession of a bomb and carrying a duffle bag chock full of ammunition and spare weapons. He was in the midst of a full-blown mental-health crisis, hearing voices that were instructing him to shoot patients and was already inside the hospital, walking its corridors and stalking victims, those who were contracted were told.
The intensity of the response, both by the law enforcement agencies and the media was massive, with sheriff’s department helicopters circling the medical center and so many sheriff’s department and police department vehicles around the hospital grounds that neither those vehicles nor those driven by passers-by or the civilians being evacuated from the medical center’s various departments and buildings could transit freely.
Those inside the facilities who were obliged by the evacuation order were scrutinized by not one or two officers with weapons at the ready near the buildings’ entrance/exits but by dozens who were primed to open fire on anyone who so much as looked to be even a bit suspicious.
The Sheriff’s Department received a call around 6 p.m. about a man who said he was armed with an AR-15 rifle and a bomb at the hospital, was experiencing a mental-health crisis and heard voices in his head that told him to shoot patients at the medical center’s children’s hospital.
The potential shooter was described as a man wearing a black shirt and pants and holding a black duffle bag, according to broadcast reports.
For the first hour-and-a-half, scouts wearing body armor and helmets who were outfitted with high-resolution body cameras gingerly walked every corridor of the massive 364-bed medical center, checking every room, hallway, and closet, anticipating a gunfight or shoot-out at any moment. Personnel in the sheriff’s department’s Eagle mobile command post were able to in real time monitor the video being recorded by those scouts, while simultaneously poring over the floor plans of each level in the medical center to ascertain what the next step and overall response to the emergency was going to be.
When no armed individual was encountered by any of the scouts, at around 7:45, a decision was made to begin clearing those patients in the hospital who could be safely moved out of the facility.
Around 8 p.m., the department, which had been purposefully tight-lipped about what the operations consisted of, announced that its deputies and officers from other responding departments were “actively clearing” the hospital.
Later that evening, after 10 p.m., the hospital, after acknowledging that medical care within the hospital complex had been interrupted, put out a statement that “Law enforcement responded to the Loma Linda University Children’s Hospital (at the medical center) this evening after an initial report of a situation in the emergency department. After a thorough investigation, it was confirmed there is no active threat on campus and normal business operations have resumed.”
While Molly Smith, a hospital spokeswoman, indicated there was “no active threat” in the medical center, the sheriff’s department did not make a similar assumption. Deputies lingered at various spots within the medical center, in particular around the children’s hospital overnight and the next morning and into the afternoon, deputies were still making wary-eyed perusals of the medical center grounds.
On the afternoon of March 13, an incensed San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus was making a statement in which he reflected the recognition that his department had been had by a hoaxer who had perpetrated what since 2008 or thereabouts has been referred to by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies as “swatting.” The term refers to provoking a SWAT [special weapons and tactics] team to respond to a particular location through a false report of an emergency situation. Dicus vowed dire consequences for the individual responsible if his department’s efforts to track down the perpetrator of the hoax proved successful.
Unbeknownst to Dicus, even as he was speaking the final touches were being put on the preparation for a nearly identical swatting incident, one which took place little more than a stone’s throw on the other side of the San Bernardino County line/Upland-Claremont border,
At 4:44 p.m., a call came into the Claremont Police Department from an individual who said he had a bomb and was holding another person hostage in a restroom on the Claremont McKenna College campus. He had a rifle, the caller said, and he was about to walk out onto the college grounds and shoot anyone and everyone he encountered.
The Claremont Police Department’s dispatch unit immediately contacted the administration department at Claremont McKenna College, providing an alert that a bomb threat had been made and a shooter was at large on the campus.
Within minutes, warnings were being disseminated, followed by a 4:56 p.m. announcement that there was a police presence at the college. In the meantime, the Claremont Police Department had put out a call for mutual aid, and the police departments in neighboring Upland and La Verne responded by detailing several cars to the school, as did Ontario. A 5:11 p.m an email went out to all students stating there was a “potential shooter on CMC Campus” and “Stay away from the area.” The email called upon anyone who saw anything suspicious to call 9-1-1 or campus police with their observations.
Campus security moved to lock down all buildings on or anywhere near the CMC campus, such as the Robert Day School of Economics, dormitories, those at adjacent Scripps and Pomona colleges, Honold Library, the graduate school, and the Peter F. Drucker School of Management. Those already inside were told to hunker down and shelter in place. Security officers approached those on foot anywhere on the campus and told them to leave the immediate area.
Shortly after the first of two engine companies with the Los Angeles County Fire Department arrived, which included members of the bomb squad, one after another ten separate SWAT teams in armored safety vehicles from the Claremont Police Department and other law enforcement agencies arrived, most converging at the corner of Columbia and Eighth Street between the CMC Campus and Honnold Library. Overhead, first one, then two and finally a third helicopter circled and crisscrossed above the campus.
By 8 p.m., after what were termed thorough and exhaustive searches of the CMC and the neighboring campuses and no one matching the description of the shooter/bomber turned up, law enforcement coordinators came to the conclusion that this was a swatting incident.
The following day, today, March 14, spring break commenced, at which point an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the students at the five undergraduate Claremont Colleges – Pomona, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer and CMC and those at the graduate school vacated those campuses for elsewhere until school resumes on April 24.
One year ago, there was considerable agitation and protest on the campus relating to
the Israel-Hamas War and the perception that Pomona College was in league with Israel.
At Pitzer College, another of the Claremont Colleges, there had been continuous protests since 2018 that involved Claremont Students for Justice in Palestine along with the Claremont Jewish Voice for Peace to convince that college’s administrators to end Pitzer’s ties with the University of Haifa in Israel which involved a study abroad program. In March 2024, in a concession to those protests, Pitzer officials had called for a vote of the student body about whether the program at the University of Haifa should be suspended, In the midst of the controversy over Israel’s occupation of Gaza, Pitzer students voted overwhelmingly to end the program.
Fresh off this victory, those students at the Claremont Colleges intensified the protests aimed at Pomona College over its ties to Israel in the aftermath of the occupation of Gaza.
A number of students, several of whom were in communication with Claremont Consortium Faculty for Justice in Palestine, began to erect on March 27, 2024 what was intended to be “protest art,” consisting of an eight-panel, 32-foot-long, eight-paneled “apartheid wall” outside the Smith Campus Center. The scenes depicted on the wall were intended to illustrate what the protester said was “unequal treatment of the Palestinian people living under the brutal conditions of the illegal Israeli Occupation” in Gaza. Slogans on the wall included, “Free Palestine,” “Disrupt the Death Machine,” “End the Murderous Occupation,” “Apartheid College; We are all Complicit,” and “Smash Imperialism, Long Live Int’l Solidarity.”
That display was accompanied by demands that Pomona College divest from Israeli companies or American, British, French and German companies aiding or providing military assistance to Israel.
On April 5, Pomona College officials dismantled the apartheid wall, which prompted an intensification of the protesters’ activity, which according to college officials involved blocking the entrances to the Pomona College main administration building and interfering with tours of the campus being given to applicants for admission to Pomona College/prospective students that were being conducted by college officials.
By 2 p.m. that afternoon there was a large gathering of protesters, which resulted in a matching show of force by the Claremont Police Department, which sent seven cars to the vicinity of Alexander Hall, Pomona College’s main administration building around which the main body of protesters was gathering. After about 15 minutes, the patrol cars left.
At around 3:45, a large number of protesters stormed into and then out of Alexander Hall, which prompted a call to the Claremont Police Department. At 4 p.m. , what was later enumerated as 18 protesters reentered the administration building and occupied the Pomona College President Gabrielle Starr’s office.
Another call went out to the Claremont Police Department, where that agency’s commanders did not feel they had sufficient manpower to quell the disturbance. Thereafter, they contacted the Pomona, La Verne and Azusa police departments, which responded by sending more than two dozen officers outfitted in riot gear.
While those officers from the three departments were en route to Claremont, another 50 protesters entered the building
Once the combined force of roughly 40 officers assembled outside the administration building, two officers entered Alexander Hall. While they were inside, the commanding officer on scene used a bullhorn to tell the protesters inside that they were being given an opportunity to leave voluntarily and immediately without any consequence.
It is not clear whether those inside could hear that offer over the chants of the crowd surrounding the building, which included, “Israel bombs, Pomona pays, how many kids will you kill today?” and “Gaza, Gaza, head held high, we will never let you die.” After several minutes passed without any reaction from those inside, the bullhorn was then used to inform those inside that they were being given the opportunity to come out of the building to accept a trespassing citation without being subject to arrest. Several minutes later, the bullhorn was again used to tell the protesters to leave. Less than five minutes later, officers from the four departments, with officers from Claremont in the lead, rushed into the building and effectuated the arrests.
The 20 students arrested taken to the Claremont Police Station where they were held for roughly seven hours, during which time, many of the protesters who had been assembled around Alexander Hall relocated to the Claremont Police Headquarters, where they resumed their protest. Inside, the 20 arrestees, who were enrolled at Pomona, Scripps and Pitzer colleges, were booked and then cite-released.
Before the 13 Pomona College students who were arrested were released around midnight, they had been identified to the Pomona College administration, which prepared emergency interim suspension documents were handed to them at the time of their release by a college employee. The emergency interim suspensions officially expelled the Pomona College students from the college campus, suspended them academically, and banned them from classes, the dormitory room each lived in, all of the college’s halls and any of the halls or classrooms of the other Claremont Colleges, any of the colleges’ dining halls, libraries or residence halls. The action meant that none of the Pomona students were able to complete their classes that semester or gain college credit from them. Any seniors that were due to graduate in May 2024 were not able to do so. Pomona College has not disclosed how many of its students arrested on April 5. 2024 were seniors due to graduate.

Both Rialto Unified School District officials and the Colton Police Department are gingerly seeking to determine the circumstances surrounding a tussle between a male student and female student at Jehue Middle School that took place on March 10, in which the girl was apparently knocked out cold when she escalated the contretemps between them by flinging a laptop computer at the boy’s head.
The final minutes and immediate aftermath of the altercation between the two were caught on video. That footage depicts a mostly-one-sided struggle in which the considerably larger boy holds the girl, who seems intent on injuring him, at bay, showing a degree of forbearance until he determinedly overpowers her by slamming her headfirst into a desk.
There are conflicting reports of what led to the violence that took place, with suggestions that the girl intensified what started out as horseplay initiated by the boy, leading to the matter spiraling out of control. Based upon the initial response of the Colton Police Department, which arrested and booked both students, despite the girl apparently being knocked unconscious, her action has been deemed to be the more serious criminal violation.
Reportedly, the boy was using a squirt gun to irritate other students, and the girl responded by smacking him in the head repeatedly  with what has been described as a metal object. That part of what occurred is not shown on the video. Continue reading →