Here in the Land of Milk and Money
A few years back, I retired from the teaching profession in Texas. Surprisingly, I was handed the mic at the end of term luncheon to say a few words of farewell. I felt obligated to explain my destination, Southern California. “To be with my people” was my story.
And I meant it.
I wanted to end my days on this mortal coil being with people who thought and voted like me. Unfortunately, California is a patchwork quilt and not a solid blue monolith, and I ended up living 10 miles north of a conservative/libertarian nightmare known as Temecula Valley.
The political powers-that-be in Temecula stand out in their intolerant attitudes toward any one of our present-day alphabet soup of celebrated causes, whether it’s BLM, DEI, CRT, ESG or LGBTQIA+.
So it’s against this backdrop that brings us to the current book adoption controversy raging in the Temecula Valley Unified School District.
I’ve participated in a book adoption. As part of that process, teachers meet and discuss the merits and demerits of a wide array of materials presented by school book publishers. Not just the textbooks themselves, mind you. All materials including the TE (Teachers Edition) and supplemental materials that students don’t necessarily ever get to see. Teachers then make their recommendations to the district, and generally those recommendations are accepted.
But not this year in Temecula.
A new school board majority was voted in just recently at Temecula Unified, and on a 3-2 vote, the board rejected a new social studies textbook recommended for the 4th grade curriculum by teachers on the adoption committee.
It seems that the textbook (or more specifically, the instructional supplements) in question contained an enrichment suggestion to the classroom teacher by proposing a discussion of former San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk who was shot and killed by a City Supervisor colleague. Milk was the first openly gay man to be elected to this important office, and Milk’s assassin was famously homophobic.
In a recent school board meeting where textbook adoptions were being discussed, the president of the Temecula board remarked “my question is why even mention a pedophile,” referring to Milk. California Governor Newsom subsequently opined in a tweet that the board president was “ignorant”.
But for that reason, and that reason alone, the “new” board rejected the textbook and its supplements.
With no other text materials being offered, that leaves nearly 2000 4th grade students without a social studies textbook for the next school year.
In protest, a rally was held yesterday by the Temecula Valley Educators Association. Another one is slated for next week, June 13th, just before the governing board is to meet again.
I attended the rally yesterday. I was with “my people” even though the rally was held in the heart of Temecula.
There were between 150 and 200 very vocal sign-bearing participants. The vast majority were classroom teachers. My people.
However, one rally participant, being baby-sat by a plainclothes member of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, was this gentleman whose moral objection is
clearly noted on his hand-held sign. Why, oh why, dear God in heaven, do the anti-transgenderists think that their issue is germaine to a textbook adoption controversy? At any rate, upon hearing his rants, anyone could conclude that this guy left the takeout window with one taco short of a combo.
Enough about him.
So here’s a question: how does the mere suggestion that a teacher could bring up the Harvey Milk history, printed in supplemental material that no 4th grader will ever read, disqualify an entire textbook package from adoption?
Here’s another. How does the Temecula Unified School board think it can get away with not providing a social studies textbook to any 4th grader in the district? It’s a violation of a California law known as The Williams Act. Among other things, the act stipulates that a student must be provided a textbook that can be taken home or used at school. Photocopied sheets are not adequate.
So it appears that the “new majority” on the Temecula Unified School board have gone awry of the California Education Code, and Governor Newsom and State School Board President Tony Thurmond have begun to weigh in.
As for “my people,” having spent an hour or so among them, I have no doubt that this issue isn’t going away anytime soon.
They are a feisty bunch.
I was lucky enough to begin school in California–which had the best public schools in the country back in those days. The school was in Sausalito–my non-Army Brat classmates all had parents who were artists and musicians and such like that. I learned about Abe Lincoln and slavery in the 1st grade! I’m just glad I’m not starting school today and don’t have children doing that, either.
1The conservative fear & hatred of gays (liberals,African Americans, South Americans, women, etc.) is pretty much a religious fanaticism. The hated groups aren’t just “the Other”, they are actively evil. Any faint hint of tolerance for their “devils” is heresy. And you know what these people do to heritics.
2Thanks for adding your voice to the protest and glad you have found your tribe. Here in the People’s Republic of Iowa City, we have watched our state fal from a national leader in public education to mediocrity and below under successive Repupublic administrations. So strange, because iowa’s educational excellence was championed by Republican “sainted Gov. Robert Ray who also welcomed as many Kmher refugees who wanted to settle here and create an expat Kmher community. The last 30 years of Republicans have been anti education and xenophobic, working both toward dumbing down our population, making the state less attractive to employers looking for a trainable workfoce, and discouraging immigration by people of color or LBGTQ folks of any srtipe. Legislatively, the worst atrocity was taking public shool funds to pay for private ( read religous) education for any one who wants it . It begins locally in places like school boards and city councils and eventually percolates into state government as the Koch Bros new and funded. It’s time to get our people back on boards and councils through actively recruiting motivated candidates and making sure everyone gets out and votes.
3I live just south of Temecula, in Fallbrook, and I’ve watched the Temecula book-ban in horror. That such a thing is happening here, in Socal, not TX or FL, is hard to believe. Book banning is just about the most un-American thing I can imagine. The right’s attack on education is becoming a civil war of ideals, a war without weapons. But a war nonetheless. We can’t afford to let children be taught only the Christo-fascist view of the world.
4Some years back I had some time to kill and wanted to see what biblical justification was used to condemn homosexuality. Chapter and verse-wise, to how I interpreted it.
5I ended up watching some of a video of some jackwagon who coulda been the inspiration for the hate-mongering preacher in the first Kingsman movie.
This kinda thing is fairly common now but wasn’t nearly as out in the open then, and it surprised me.
But the point I’m trying to make is that before I’d had enough of all the vile f**king crap this guy was spewing something caught my attention. At one point, while venomously making some heinous accusation, he casually mentioned homosexuals being pedophiles, because all homosexuals are pedophiles, …..
See what happened there?
He just threw that in there nonchalantly as if it was an established fact, and then fired back up with the vitriol.
Oddly enough, I didn’t get much further into the “sermon”
Glad you found Your People….thanks for joining them against this…madness?….idiocy?….I dunno, there aren’t really any words strong or inclusive enough to describe it!
Also, thank you for the acronyms. I’m going to design a new bumper sticker – “OPUS DEI”. As in “The Work of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”. Only the cognoscenti will have a clue.
6A thoughtful post. In 2018. I moved from supposedly liberal Hawaii to deep red Carroll County, Maryland, where the Democrats don’t even run candidates.
But I associated with righwingers in Hawaii and can find leftwingers here. It is at the institutional, not personal, level that communities take their character. I learned that growing up in the Deep South. Lots of people didn’t care much about race, not enough to challenge the racists.
7Wally @ 3
I raised three children in Iowa in the ’80s. I am not so high on education there as the state was.
But public temperament was good. Ray was unique in welcoming refugees (mostly Hmong, though, not Khmer, though; but many Vietnamese.)
But underneath, just waiting for leadership, were the religious nuts. I worked at the Des Moines Register and spent many hours trying to get the paper to cover, eg, the gospel singalongs that filled the Civic Auditorium four times a year.
These were the largest gatherings in the state other than fairs and football games, but did not get a line of print.
8Here in Fredericksburg, TX, we just had a local election for school board trustees. One of the candidates had posters with rhetoric about “protecting our kids,” and we all know what that means.
On the ballot you could vote for any two candidates, one candidate, or none. The backers of the “protect our kids” guy had encouraged people to vote for him alone to dilute the chances of the others. Fortunately, it backfired on them and he lost. However, I hold little hope that this is the end of their attempts to prevail.
9Here in Houston, our HISD was taken over by the state and the new manager appointed by Abbott seems to hate librarians, sort of equating them with coat check girls. I’m sure this slow removal of librarians is just a first step to rid our schools of those degenerate libraries.
10Letter sent to Temecula Unified
https://www.scribd.com/document/651433287/California-Attorney-General-Rob-Bonta-Letter-to-Temecula-Valley-Unified-School-District
11I went to a parochial school in a down-income area of Detroit for 12 years. Any books we had were hand me downs from other more moneyed parochial schools. Hence, none of them were new in any way. We learned about World War I buy not World War II, that kind of thing. Plus, there never seemed to be enough copies for everyone. I learned early on what a public library was and where the best one, Main, was located. It was 14 walking blocks away or one quick bus ride for 25 cents. This was the only way I managed to get a GPA that might interest any college anywhere. Anywhere meant staying in Detroit despite my best efforts. Question: if the public schools are that bad with the textbooks, is the same thing happening to the public libaries. In other words, do the kids have a chance in heck of getting he decent education they need to even think of competiting in the real world?
12Addendum: when I found out that the segregated black children in the south also had to learn from absolutely ancient and battered books I really got interested in the Civil Rights movement and put some work into it, usually via the Young Dems. One of the best things i ever did.
13Agree completely with all of you, especially KM Williams @2.
The fanatical Christofascists really do want more than just dominance, they crave the final solution of utter elimination of their perceived ‘others’. A reality that I still doubt that most libruls fully understand yet. Wake up peeps..
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maggie @12/13, I spent 12 years at a Downriver parochial school in a small town [SFX, maybe we crossed paths]; it was fairly well equipped for the time, and in retrospect the mostly clerical staff were excellent.
The public schools were adequate, I guess, but race sometimes was an issue. We had near zero blacks until I was a junior, iirc, when a Dr’s son transferred into my class , and very few Hispanics; my graduating class numbered just over 50 in ’65. It was a French-Canadian culture in the school and town [half the surnames and placenames were French].
We covered all of the current stuff in science, math, current affairs, politics, etc., plus rigorous languages etc, [English, Latin, French].
Our award-winning public library was just a block away from my house [it was only a couple years old when I began 1st grade ~’53], and a half-block from the school [on W. Outer Drive/Jeff].
Maybe unusual for many such schools then, and likely moreso today.
14A much different world then.
I referenced this in my recent post, but I was flabbergasted when one of those comedy shows interviewed people at Trump rallies and asked them what percentage of the population was transgender. One of those interviewed calmly and seriously said 20 percent. On the one hand, we could write that off as one idiot, but then you had the other idiot that just
“knew” that schools in Chicago were putting litter boxes in the school restrooms.
The reporter even read him a correction from the superintendent of the school district. It didn’t phase the idiot. He just knew better. I’ve encountered these people at church. They just “know” something is happening that simply isn’t happening in our schools. I could tell them this isn’t happening and they won’t believe it.
This is a simple proposition. If more people are becoming transgender or LGTBQ+ then that means that someone or something is convincing them to do this. If we then believe the rumors that someone somewhere knows about our schools then we now have a segment of the population ready to make moves to “protect” the kids from these things. From there, there is no going back. You can’t convince them otherwise in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
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