A school district in southern California will be fined more than $1m after rejecting a curriculum that included Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay rights leader who the the school board’s president has called a “pedophile”.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor, announced on Wednesday that his office will send textbooks to the Temecula school district that include Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the state, as well as fine the district $1.5m for failing to “adopt an updated social studies curriculum”.
“California will ensure students in Temecula begin the school year with access to materials reviewed by parents and recommended by teachers across the district,” Newsom said in a statement.
“After we deliver the textbooks into the hands of students and their parents, the state will deliver the bill … to the school board for its decision to willfully violate the law, subvert the will of parents, and force children to use an out-of-print textbook from 17 years ago.”
The Temecula Valley unified school district, which oversees about 28,000 students in Riverside county, has been at the center of a growing controversy over its approach to LGBTQ+, diversity and inclusion issues. In May, the district school board president, Joseph Komrosky, said while discussing an elementary social science curriculum that included Milk: “My question is, why even mention a pedophile?”
The comment repeats a conspiracy theory that falsely accuses gay people of molesting children at higher rates than heterosexual people. Komrosky and two other school board members then struck down the social science curriculum in a 3-2 vote, leaving the district without a textbook for the coming year.
His comments caught the attention of Newsom. “An offensive statement from an ignorant person. This isn’t Texas or Florida,” the governor said in June. “In the Golden State, our kids have the freedom to learn.”
This week the board saw a marathon nine-hour meeting in which some parents voiced support for the conservative officials, describing Newsom as a tyrant and a teacher was removed after calling a conservative board member a “homophobe”. At the meeting, Danny Gonzalez, a conservative board member, said he did not support teaching students about the gay liberation movement and that the curriculum would promote pedophilia, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“I think it’s pathetic that the governor has stepped in because you guys aren’t doing your jobs,” Kristi McClure, a parent, said on Tuesday, according to the newspaper. “It’s not overreach; it’s not a violation of local control – it’s what happens at any business when an employee fails to do the basics of their job.”
The school board again voted to reject the adoption of a new social studies curriculum that had been recommended by teachers and reviewed by parents.
The battle in Temecula echoes culture wars taking place across the US as conservative leaders increasingly target the LGBTQ+ community and issues such as race, gender and sexuality in education. Republicans in deep blue California last year set their sights on school board positions overseeing the state’s 10,000 public schools as a way to expand their footprint – an effort that was largely unsuccessful.
But in Temecula, conservatives were able to win school board seats and took action, including banning critical race theory, the academic practice of examining racism in US laws and society that conservatives sometimes use as a catch-all for curriculum related to race.
Their decisions have left the district’s students using a textbook published in 2006, the governor’s office said and the district is out of compliance with at least three state laws. Newsom has backed proposed legislation that would seek to fine school districts that “fail to provide adequate instructional materials”.
