David Myers, the most dynamic of San Bernardino County’s conservationists of the current or preceding generations, has died.
Born in La Habra, not too distant from the southwesternmost extension of San Bernardino County, in 1952, his family relocated to Chino Hills when he was a toddler. He ambled and sometimes rode horses among the wildlands around his home, with its Oak Trees, fields full of lizards, horned toads and tree frogs, as well as its streams, rivulets and rills, filled with crawdads, frogs and snails in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while it was still an unincorporated county area consisting primarily of agricultural uses.
As Orange County was expanding by leaps and bounds and undeveloped land there was being sold off to developers, yielding for its owners a tremendous profit, be watched the earth movers, Caterpillars, earthscrapers and bulldozers eliminate the elements of nature he loved. It registered with him that the Canadian geese and arctic gulls that flew south every fall and wintered in Chino Hills would one day lose their destination, if that developmental frenzy continued it eastward progression. On occasion, during summer vacations, he was removed entirely from Southern California and the encroachment of civilization on nature, when he vacationed with his family in the Sierra Nevadas. At 17, he hiked the John Muir Trail.
In 1970, he began studying for a college degree in liberal arts at Cal State Fullerton, taking botany, religion, psychology and literature classes. In the summer of 1971, he managed a ranch in the Great Basin
While in college, he was alarmed to learn that a plan was afoot to establish an international airport in Pipes Canyon, between Yucca Valley to the east and the San Bernardino Mountains to the west. Networking with others, his group arranged to purchase property that they felt would be crucial to the airport development project, and the airport was never seriously pursed.
He did not graduate from college, becoming a carpenter who took pride in delivering high quality furniture to his customers. He never lost his interest in preserving nature, wherever he could.
Despite despising the manner in which real estate developers utilized the leverage of their wealth or access to financing to overwhelm landowners to purchase property at as low of a price as possible before obtaining an entitlement to build on it or get zoning alterations to maximize its value when it was developed, Myers learned from them and adopted their tactics, recognizing that he could purchase property that lay in the footprint of where those intent on building were going to place their next project. He would acquire some of that acreage and then bargain with the developers, getting top dollar for it and then using that money to purchase wildland acreage he and his cohorts were determined to save from development into perpetuity. Continue reading →

Four Chinese nationals were sentenced to federal prison today for their participation in a complex scheme that involved the theft of hundreds of identities to defraud multiple domestic retailers out of at least $1.2 million.
A fifth co-conspirator was previously sentenced to more than four years in prison, and a sixth is awaiting sentencing following a guilty plea.
As part of the scheme, these six defendants stole the victims’ identities – including their Social Security numbers, dates of birth and home addresses – and used that information to make fake driver’s licenses that were used to access credit in the victims’ names at large national retailers, including Ulta Beauty, Sephora, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Williams-Sonoma, Dillard’s, and Saks Fifth Avenue.
The four defendants, all Chinese nationals who entered the country under false pretenses, were sentenced today by United States District Judge Stephen V. Wilson. All four pleaded guilty on January 6. They are:
Kar Kee “Steven” Cheung, 36, of Chino Hills, was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of visa fraud, one count of possession of equipment used to manufacture false identification documents, and one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud; Qian Guo, 37, of Chino Hills, was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison for one count of possession of equipment used to manufacture false identification documents and one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud; Chongming “Ming” Wang, 28, of Temple City, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for one count of conspiracy to commit access device fraud and one count of aiding and abetting access device fraud in excess of $1,000; and Jiaozhu “Yanny” Yan, 30, of Alhambra, was sentenced to 12 months and one day in federal prison for one count of visa fraud. Continue reading →

By Richard Hernandez
Less than a year after Governor Gavin Newsom and the two-thirds Democrat California Legislature provided free health care to low-income immigrants including those in the United States illegally, California is now confronted with a $6.2 billion shortfall in the fund for Medi-Cal services.
Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid health care program, which pays for a variety of medical services for children and adults with limited income and resources. A joint federal and state program, Medicaid provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources. Each state runs its own version of Medicaid as a program available to citizens of that particular state eligible for the service. While originally intended for and administered to provide health care insurance to California’s lowest income individuals and families, Medi-Cal’s eligibility requirements and benefits have been modified and liberalized over the years to become more and more inclusive. At present, approaching 15 million of the state’s nearly 40 million residents are recipients of some form of Medi-Cal assistance, including roughly 2.4 million noncitizens, the vast majority of whom are illegal aliens from Mexico.
As a consequence, Governor Newsom, whose final term as governor is to conclude in January 2027, and the members of his party who dominate both California’s lower legislative house, the Assembly, and the California Senate are scrambling to find some graceful and face-saving way to acknowledge that the state’s minority Republicans were correct last year when they argued that allowing able-bodied undocumented foreigners residing in California between the ages of 27 and 64 inclusive to participate in the Medi-Cal System would stretch it unto breaking. Now, those same Democrat politicians are trying to find a way to perhaps remove those most recently welcomed into the program – those being low-income adults living in California regardless of their immigration status – in the aftermath of that portion of the state’s population growing accustomed to receiving a heretofore unavailable benefit that is now perceived by those recipients as an entitlement. Continue reading →

Mostly in vain, residents of San Bernardino County’s desert areas, most particularly in and around Barstow, Yucca Valley, Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms and several surrounding areas have been trying to convince California wildlife officials that the permit fees to improve property on land that involves Western Joshua Trees are too onerous.
In 2023, California approved the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act. Now the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is under the gun to complete by June 30 the California’s Joshua Tree Conservation Plan, whereupon it will be fully implemented.
For many desert residents, the element of the plan most important to them is that aspect of it which will entail the fees to be paid by landowners when they undertake development on their property within a distance of 186 feet or less from Western Joshua Trees.
There is widespread concern among desert residents and landowners that the fees required to do work near western Joshua trees are too high. Despite those sentiments, Fish and Wildlife employees maintain that their hands are tied and the fees being charged, were, essentially etched into cement by an act of the legislature based upon previous discussions and determinations.
In accordance with suggestions by the Department of Fish and Wildlife, both the California Senate and the California Assembly layered into the Western Joshua Tree Conservation Act a permitting process to assist in regulating how the land upon which Western Joshua Trees, known by their scientific name, Yucca brevifolia, are located are disturbed. Continue reading →

NOTICE OF PETITION TO ADMINISTER ESTATE OF: MARGARET YILEK
CASE NO. PROVA2500800
To all heirs, beneficiaries, creditors, contingent creditors, and persons who may otherwise be interested in the will or estate, or both of MARGARET YILEK:
A PETITION FOR PROBATE has been filed by LISA LAWRENCE in the Superior Court of California, County of SAN BERNARDINO.
THE PETITION FOR PROBATE requests that LISA LAWRENCE be appointed as personal representatives to administer the estate of the decedent.
THE PETITION requests authority to administer the estate under the Independent Administration of Estates Act. (This authority will allow the personal representative to take many actions without obtaining court approval. Before taking certain very important actions, however, the personal representative will be required to give notice to interested persons unless they have waived notice or consented to the proposed action.) The independent administration authority will be granted unless an interested person files an objection to the petition and shows good cause why the court should not grant the authority.
A hearing on the petition will be held in Dept. F-1 at 9:00 a.m. on April 14, 2025
San Bernardino County Superior Court Fontana District
Department F1 – Fontana
17780 Arrow Boulevard
Fontana, CA 92335
IF YOU OBJECT to the granting of the petition, you should appear at the hearing and state your objections or file written objections with the court before the hearing. Your appearance may be in person or by your attorney.
IF YOU ARE A CREDITOR or a contingent creditor of the decedent, you must file your claim with the court and mail a copy to the personal representative appointed by the court within the later of either (1) four months from the date of first issuance of letters to a general personal representative, as defined in section 58(b) of the California Probate Code, or (2) 60 days from the date of mailing or personal delivery to you of a notice under Section 9052 of the California Probate Code.
Other California statutes and legal authority may affect your rights as a creditor. You may want to consult with an attorney knowledgeable in California law.
YOU MAY EXAMINE the file kept by the court. If you are a person interested in the estate, you may file with the court a Request for Special Notice (form DE-154) of the filing of an inventory and appraisal of estate assets or of any petition or account as provided in Probate Code section 1250. A Request for Special Notice form is available from the court clerk.
Attorney for Lisa Lawrence:
ANTONIETTE JAUREGUI (SB 192624)
1894 COMMERCENTER WEST, SUITE 108
SAN BERNARDINO, CA 92408
Telephone No: (909) 890-2350
Fax No: (909) 890-0106
ajprobatelaw@gmail.com
Published in the San Bernardino County Sentinel on February 28 and March 7, 14 & 21, 2025.

ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE FOR CHANGE OF NAME CASE
NUMBER CIV SB 2501825,
TO ALL INTERESTED PERSONS: Petitioner: ,Kaitlyn Ann Terzino, filed with this court for a decree changing names as follows: Kaitlyn Ann Terzino to Kaitlyn Ann Ho, THE COURT ORDERS that all persons interested in this matter appear before this court at the hearing indicated below to show cause, if any, why the petition for change of name should not be granted. Any person objecting to the name changes described above must file a written objection that includes the reasons for the objection at least two court days before the matter is scheduled to be heard and must appear at the hearing to show cause why the petition should not be granted. If no written objection is timely filed, the court may grant the petition without a hearing.
Notice of Hearing:
Date: 04/21/2025, Time: 08:30 AM, Department: 524The address of the court is Superior Court of California, County of San Bernardino, San Bernardino District-Civil Division, 247 West Third Street, San Bernardino, CA 92415, IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that a copy of this order be published in the SBCS ? Rancho Cucamonga in San Bernardino County California, once a week for four successive weeks prior to the date set for hearing of the petition.
Dated: 02/19/2025
Judge of the Superior Court: Gilbert G. Ochoa
Published in the SBCS Rancho Cucamonga on 02/28/2025, 03/07/2025, 03/14/2025, 03/21/2025

Continue reading →

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 forced 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.