How one school district in Southern California became an epicenter of anti-trans attacks

Heather Polk has always known her hometown of Temecula, California, is conservative. Still, she said, that in her 21 years of working in schools there, she has rarely felt targeted for her identity.

Polk is a counselor at Erle Stanley Gardner Middle School and also happens to be a lesbian. She recalled that during her time in the Temecula Valley Unified School District, she only ever worked with one administrator who had anti-LGBTQ views.

So it’s been jarring to her that there are now a handful of other teachers who have referred to her as a “groomer.” And it was even more off-putting when her school district began considering a policy that effectively requires teachers to out transgender students to their parents. In the early morning hours on Aug. 23, the Temecula Valley Unified School District became the third Southern California school district to adopt such a policy.

“I’ve never had a problem, like ever, ever, ever,” Polk told the American Independent Foundation. “Never once in this town. Nothing. I’ve never had an issue. So apparently it’s OK with lesbians, but trans people, they just get their undies in a bundle.”

The culture wars in Temecula, an exurb north of San Diego, have been brewing for several months since three conservative board members — Joseph Komrosky, Danny Gonzalez, and Jennifer Wiersma — defeated incumbents to be elected as the school board’s new majority.

The three were key to the Temecula school board’s 3-2 vote to adopt its new parental notification policy, which requires teachers to notify parents within three days of learning their child wishes to go by a gender or name not on their official records or to use bathrooms, locker rooms or other facilities allocated for a different gender.

In an Aug. 23 statement, California Attorney General Rob Bonta condemned the Temecula board’s vote and said the rising trend of school boards passing anti-trans policies is “of grave concern.”

“My office is closely monitoring the situation and will not tolerate districts compromising the safety and privacy of transgender and gender nonconforming students. We will remain committed to ensuring school policies do not violate students’ civil rights,” Bonta said.

Bonta has also criticized school districts in Chino and Murrieta over their identical policies; he opened an investigation into the Chino district, which in July became the first California school district to enact a parental notification policy. Along with Temecula, these school districts show that even deep-blue states like California aren’t safe from reactionary politics; all it takes is one school board majority.

Polk, who serves as the adviser to her middle school’s gay-straight alliance, says students have been devastated by the school board’s decision.

She said that on Aug. 18, the day after the school district posted an agenda listing the new policy as an action item for its Aug. 22 board meeting, she had a line out her door of students wanting to talk about the ramifications of the policy.

The school year had just begun on Aug. 14, and, Polk said, some students had started off the year asking teachers to refer to them by different names and pronouns who had not disclosed their identities to their parents.

“When I told them that teachers are going to have to decide to follow the board policy or not, they just welled up in tears and their faces got red, and they were just terrified at the thought of a teacher picking up the phone and telling their parents,” Polk said.

The school has a lot of students who are gender-nonconforming or gender-fluid, and a handful of trans kids. With this new policy, Polk said, many of these students will be going back into the closet, at least with teachers.

“For the most part, I think what my kids have decided to do is to go back, and the teachers that they told to please use a different name and pronoun, they’re going to tell those teachers that they changed their mind and they don’t want to use those names and pronouns, which is hard, because the only place that they can be themselves was at school,” Polk said. “And now, they can’t even be themselves at school.”

She said she planned to take down both a pride flag and a poster promoting respect for Black lives in her office for a back-to-school night on Aug. 24.

“I just don’t want to add fuel to the fire, just for that night,” she said.

Temecula has long had a conservative tilt. Registered Republicans are a plurality of the city’s voters, outnumbering Democrats 38% to 31% as of February 2023, according to data from the California Secretary of State’s office. That’s a significant change from 2000, when 57% of the city’s voters were Republicans, while 24% were Democrats. Despite this downward trend in registered Republicans, it’s only recently that the town has begun to see some truly reactionary elements take over local governance.

Komrosky, Gonzalez, and Wiersma were all backed by the conservative Inland Empire Family PAC. The organization’s website lists “critical race theory,” “transgenderism encouraged,” “forced LGBTQ+ acceptance,” and “perverted sexual training” under the heading “The Problem in Schools.”

The PAC is backed by Pastor Tim Thompson of the Christian 412 Church Temecula Valley, whose YouTube channel is filled with descriptions of teachers as “groomers,” references to critical race theory, and complaints about mask mandates.

Komrosky, Gonzalez, and Wiersma did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

“We used to just be a normal, conservative town where people just went about their business,” Polk said. “And now it’s radical and extreme.”

The new majority on the Temecula school board started its tenure with a vote on banning critical race theory from the district.

In May, the board was criticized by LGBTQ+ rights advocates for refusing to adopt a social studies curriculum that mentioned slain gay civil rights leader Harvey Milk. After California Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to fine the school district $1.5 million, the board voted unanimously to approve the curriculum, with the caveat that the supplemental materials mentioning Milk would still be pulled and reviewed.

The board has drawn fire for spending thousands of dollars to hire an anti-critical race theory consultant and for firing the district superintendent without cause.

Temecula Valley schools are now facing both a lawsuit from its teachers’ union over the critical race theory ban and the state’s civil rights investigation.

Morale among Temecula’s teachers and their sense of place in the wider community has completely deteriorated, said Annalisa Bujas, a teacher at Helen Hunt Jackson Elementary School.

“We’ve gone from a really quiet, peaceful community to this community that now has board meetings where people are yelling at each other,” Bujas said. You’ve got teachers being yelled at and pointed at and being called pedophiles and groomers. And I am a mom. I am a Christian. I am a teacher. I am a mentor. I am completely and utterly appalled that anyone would look at an educator and say such heinous things based on absolutely no fact other than social media posts.”

What Bujas is saying is not hyperbole. At one June school board meeting, Edgar Diaz, the president of Temecula Valley’s teachers union, played a recording of what he said was a voicemail a teacher in the school district received. On the recording, a caller can be heard referring to the teacher as “disgusting” and indicating their belief that students are being taught things that are “sexual” or “anything with gayness or anything like that.”

At least half a dozen teachers have received hateful or threatening voicemails, and an Instagram page called “We the Parents TVUSD” has doxxed teachers, posting their pictures and contact information, Diaz told the American Independent Foundation.

The school board has not just tolerated but actively fostered this hostile climate, teachers said.

Some teachers said they thought the actions of Temecula Valley Unified’s new conservative board were further attempts by conservatives to delegitimize public education. Wiersma has worked as a charter school administrator, according to a political action committee that supported her candidacy.

“What do I think they’re trying to accomplish? Well, there’s national organizations involved in this,” said Nancy Young, a teacher at Chaparral High School and a school board member in Murrieta who voted against that district’s parental notification policy. “I think they’re trying to privatize public education and create a system of vouchers, including sending them to religious institutions.”

Jeff Pack, who founded One Temecula Valley PAC last year to counter the conservative board and is now organizing a recall effort against it, said: “A lot of what this is is this small band of people that have decided that they’re going to be part of this taking back school boards and essentially adhering to a nationwide policy or movement that is defunding and dismantling public education in this country. And they seem to think that if they can start it here, then it’ll take off throughout the state of California. But the fact is, it’s just not ever going to happen, not in our lifetime, so in the meanwhile, we’re going to have 25 school boards or school districts that are on fire.”

Kristi Hirst, a former teacher in Chino who co-founded the education nonprofit Our Schools USA to push back against right-wing extremism in schools, said she thinks conservative school board members are being used as pawns in a national movement to bring about “the slow dismantling of public education.”

“I think on the local level, these people have been manipulated to fulfill this plan that I don’t even think they’re fully aware of,” Hirst said. “I don’t think the local school board members see the big picture. But the big picture definitely has to do with the breakdown of public education.”

A dedicated group of right-wing activists has been showing up at school board meetings in Temecula, Murrieta, Chino, and elsewhere to support anti-trans policies. Komrosky, the Temecula school board president, was seen at the Murrieta Valley school board’s vote on a parental notification policy on Aug. 10. There, he was photographed with Chloe Cole, an anti-trans activist; Jessica Tapia, an ex-teacher who claims she was fired for refusing to recognize trans students identities; and activists who previously showed up to the Chino Valley school board’s parental notification policy vote, according to information provided by Our Schools USA.

Polk said that although she was hesitant in the past about starting the GSA at her school because she is gay and had encountered some homophobia, she’s not worried about her position: “I’ve been in the district for a really long time. They’d have a hard time firing me.”

It’s the kids she says she’s worried about. She said there are teachers at Gardner who aren’t shy about their opposition to trans kids. She says she also worries about the more junior teachers she works alongside.

“There’s young teachers who aren’t tenured yet and they can get fired for any reason at any time,” Polk said. “And they’re the ones that are younger, and so kids feel really comfortable telling them things, so they know a lot more about these kids than a lot of people do, and they’re the ones who are really put, I think, in the worst place.”

Still, she says the majority of staff members have always been supportive of trans and gender-nonconforming students.

“They want to communicate to the students that they are supportive, but maybe don’t tell them so much,” Polk said. “They kind of want it to be like ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of a thing. So I think it probably won’t be an organized thing, like with the administration, because even though they’re supportive of people like me, they’re in a different spot. They can’t really say much. I think there’s going to be a lot of conversations with teachers trying to figure out how to navigate this.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.