Voters in the Orange Unified School District will decide if they want to remove school board trustees Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner from office in the March 5 primary election.
A group of parents, teachers and community members launched efforts to start a recall election against the two trustees after the board called a special meeting in January 2023 to abruptly fire Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen and put an assistant superintendent on paid leave.
[Read: Two Orange Unified School Board Members May Face a Recall Election]
Darshan Smaaladen, a member of the recall group, said in a Tuesday emailed statement to that the recall stems from more than Hansen’s firing – she said the trustees are dragging “culture wars” into the classroom and not putting the students first
“Our schools should not be grounds for the culture wars that Miner and Ledesma have incited in an attempt to distract voters from the one true fact: they are not acting in the best interest of students or taxpayers and are wasting millions in taxpayer dollars, often to their personal gain,” Smaaladen wrote.
“Miner and Ledesma allegedly fired our superintendent because of low test scores, yet they have passed zero new curriculum-based policies this past year,” she said.
Ledesma and Miner did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
The two trustees criticized recall efforts in an opinion article in the OC Register last month calling it “a thinly veiled assault on parental rights.”
“When we won our elections to the OUSD Board less than two years ago, we did so on the promise of defending parents’ rights, fighting for curriculum transparency, working to improve test scores, prioritizing student safety, and ensuring education is not replaced with indoctrination,” they wrote.
“We followed through on those promises, which is why Sacramento bureaucrats and union bosses are losing their minds and waging an all-out war against us.”
A group formed against the recall, argues that the efforts are a “special interest power grab” and an attempt to strip parental rights.
Their committee, No Recall, Parents Protecting our Kids Against the Recall of OUSD Boardmembers Ledesma and Miner, has raised over $102,000 as of Jan. 20, with the Lincoln Club of OC sending over $30,000 into the committee, according to the Registrar of Voters.
The Citizens for the Recall of Ledesma, Ortega, Miner and Rumsey, a committee in favor of the recall, have raised over $238,000 as of Jan. 20 with the Orange Unified Education Association – the local teacher’s union– spending over $21,000 into the committee, according to the Registrar of Voters.
Trustees Face Recall
The recall comes after the school board, with support from Ledesma and Miner, took up a host of contentious issues in the past year.
Firing Superintendent Hansen was one of the first moves the board took after the 2022 election.
The firing sparked fierce pushback from some parents and two different lawsuits alleging the board violated California’s open government meeting law – the Brown Act.
[Read: Orange School District Hit With Two Brown Act Lawsuits Over Superintendent Firing]
An investigation by OC District Attorney Todd Spitzer found that the board members did not violate the Brown Act, but that there was evidence that Board Member Kris Erickson did by disclosing confidential information from a closed door meeting to the OC Register.
The school board also waded into national political issues.
Throughout 2023, school board officials adopted a controversial transgender notification policy, temporarily suspending their digital library over concerns of age inappropriate books and banning the flying on LGBTQ+ flag on district flagpoles.
In September, proponents of the recall submitted over 18,000 signatures to recall Ledesma and over 18,000 to recall Miner. The Registrar of Voters certified the signatures in October after examining a random sample of 5% of the signatures, according to the county’s registrar of voters Bob Page.
They needed at least 13,046 valid signatures for each trustee to spark a recall against them.
Ledesma was reelected to the school board in 2022 with 31,556 votes.
Miner, a political newcomer, was elected in 2022 with over 31,000 votes – beating her opponent by roughly 200 votes.
If the two trustees are recalled, the board will have to choose between appointing two people to fill the vacancies until the November election, call a special election to fill the spots or wait until November for voters to elect two new board members.
Hosam Elattar is a Voice of OC reporter and corps member with Report for America, a GroundTruth initiative. Contact him at helattar@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @ElattarHosam.