Time May Be Up for a Far-Right School Board President Who Embroiled a California District in Controversy

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This post originally appeared on The 19th.

The end of Joseph Komrosky’s time as the board president of the Temecula Valley Unified School District may be very near, according to preliminary results from a special recall election against him.

As of Friday, a slight majority of voters in his trustee area — 51.10 to 48.90 percent — supported recalling him, an effort local and national activists launched a year ago after Komrosky drew national attention to the Southern California school district’s hard right turn in a blue state. Temecula is about 58 miles from San Diego and 85 miles from Los Angeles.

Komrosky did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment before publication. He was one of three conservatives elected to the five-member school board in 2022 with support from the right-wing Inland Empire Family PAC. Together, they formed a majority that allowed them to institute a series of conservative policies that were also sweeping school districts across the country after pandemic lockdowns led conservative groups to scrutinize school district curricula and turn classrooms into the epicenter of the nation’s culture wars.  Those policies included banning race-conscious instruction — or what opponents call “critical race theory” — and all flags other than the American flag, a move perceived to be a slight against Pride flags.

The board also voted to fire Superintendent Jodi McClay without stating a reason and for a gender identity disclosure policy that would’ve required school personnel to “out” students to their parents. The board’s decision to temporarily ban a social studies curriculum for mentioning gay trailblazer Harvey Milk, whom Komrosky referred to as “a pedophile,” led to a rebuke from Gov. Gavin Newsom. The board’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda and curriculum restrictions have prompted lawsuits.

Dozens of women, including mothers, grandmothers, teachers, lawyers and activists, worked to gather the signatures needed to recall the far-right board members. Leading this effort was the One Temecula Valley PAC, a political action committee whose founders say was created to unify rather than divide Temecula. In December, One Temecula Valley announced that it had accumulated enough signatures for a recall vote on Komrosky. That same month, recall supporters scored another victory when Danny Gonzalez, a member of the board’s conservative majority, announced that he was relocating and resigning from the school board.

A recall election took place June 4 and now Jeff Pack, cofounder of the PAC, is cautiously optimistic that the effort has succeeded based on the unofficial election tallies.

“It is a testament to what bipartisanship can do,” Pack said of the election results. “We wouldn’t have been successful if some Republican and ‘no party preference’ people hadn’t agreed with us that there was destructive behavior on the school board and something needed to be done about it. Twenty-five to 30 percent of our signatures and our votes came from Republicans or no party preference, so that makes me feel good that there are people out there that are looking beyond the party lines.”

In Temecula, a plurality of voters are Republican. Pack said that the goal of the recall effort was not to suggest that conservatives shouldn’t serve on the school board. Rather, the recall supporters objected to the conservatives in question because they found their policies to be detrimental to the community.

“What ended up happening was they brought national politics into local elections,” Pack said. “So there was a blur there, where people are like, ‘Oh, this is just what they do in Congress, and that’s not how it’s supposed to go here.’ These are nonpartisan seats, so more people are aware of that now. They’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t want all this political talk, and we don’t want all this religious talk. There should be a separation. While that may be a conversation that I do want to have at the national level, I don’t want to have it in our school board meetings.’”

Alana Byrd, national field director for People for the American Way, a nationwide progressive advocacy group that joined the recall effort, said that last year, she tempered her expectations about the campaign’s chances of success. She’d been told that “recalls are doomed to fail,” she said. “So we would do our best and be OK with any outcome, but I certainly didn’t expect to be sitting here almost a year later with a Democratic majority on the board.”

Byrd believes the recall race succeeded, in part, because of the efforts of women on the ground and because Temecula hasn’t historically had contentious school board elections.

“It was very much like this person was running on more money for athletic programs, and this person was running on greater literacy programs,” she said of the city’s past. “It wasn’t about banning CRT or calling major historical figures pedophiles. They snuck in under the radar, and that’s why this recall was successful, because people said, ‘Well, what the heck is this?’”

Pack said that more residents now have a better understanding of what it means to be engaged in local civics. People knocked on doors and wrote postcards to spread the word about the recall campaign — and he hopes they continue to mobilize during future elections.

It's the latest in an uptick of anti-LGBTQ\+ activism in California this year.

“Obviously, I’m proud of the hundreds and hundreds of people who spent thousands and thousands of hours trying to make this happen,” Pack said. “We have teams that work on content, that work on marketing, that work on canvassing, that are headed up by just regular people. We have data teams that go over the data and look at who, for instance, signed the petition and gave us a list of who we should be emailing.”

In November, right-wing candidates could be elected to the school board once more, as multiple  seats will be up for election. But Pack said that candidates backed by the Inland Empire Family PAC, affiliated with evangelical Pastor Tim Thompson, will no longer be able to catch voters by surprise like they did in 2022.

“We now know what the IE Family PAC candidates can and will do if they’re elected,” he said. “What didn’t exist in 2022 was One Temecula Valley PAC, so we weren’t there to push back and say, ‘If they’re elected, they’re going to put forth all these policies and blow through all this money and make it a political sideshow.’ We’ve got evidence to show that’s what they’ll do if they’re elected, so they don’t have the luxury that they had before of blindsiding everybody like they did.”

Election results are expected to be certified Thursday. If the recall votes maintain their lead, Komrosky would have to step down immediately at that point. Only one member of the board’s former conservative majority, Jen Wiersma, would remain on the board. The trustees could then appoint Komrosky’s successor or request a special election for one to be chosen later this year.

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Originally Appeared on them.