Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Back in August, a group of people gathered inside a local church, a little south of Willow Glen in San Jose. They opened the meeting with a prayer. But this wasn’t a church meeting. It was a gathering hosted by the Silicon Valley Association of Republican Women about what’s getting taught in public schools.
*audio from meeting*
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: The prayer was part of a call to bring like minded conservatives together and prepare them for public office in particular, to try and encourage more conservatives to get into the management and oversight of public schools in the South Bay. By running for school board.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Today, the conservative groups in the South Bay who want to take control of public schools.
Guy Marzorati: What really fascinated me about the meeting was it kind of gave a peek behind the curtain of how these groups are talking, you know, behind closed doors.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Guy Marzorati is a political correspondent for KQED.
Guy Marzorati: So at the meeting, you had Silicon Valley Association of Republican Women, some of the successful conservative school board candidates in the South Bay. And then this leader of a local group that’s called Informed Parents of Silicon Valley.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, tell me about them. I know they were there. Who was there representing that group and what was he talking about?
Guy Marzorati: Right. So you had Larry Pegram, who’s the head of informed Parents of Silicon Valley.
Larry Pegram: We are here to restore parental rights, to regain parental control, to oppose, CRT, to oppose.
Guy Marzorati: He’s a former San Jose City Council member who served in the seventies and really for the decades since has been a big activist locally against gay rights. He fought against anti-discrimination ordinances in the eighties. He fought against gay marriage. And so his group right now is focused on encouraging parents to opt their kids out of sex ed.
Larry Pegram: We do support health based sex education, and that teaches the reproductive cycle. Biology. Is a concept.
Guy Marzorati: Not only was he there encouraging and supporting people to run for office, but he kind of really laid out the link between what his group was doing around curriculum and then getting people to run for school board.
Larry Pegram: The Importance of parents organizations. Hugely important because when this gentleman and this gentleman decide that they want to stand up and be a school board member, they need help.
Guy Marzorati: And Pegram said his hope is that all these parents kind of connect and then form local groups in their district, these parent groups. And then when a conservative candidate runs for office, these parent groups are going to kind of serve as a backbone for the campaign.
Larry Pegram: And here’s the one I like. You have to create a volunteer army.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I know one candidate who’d actually won a school board seat. Linda Chavez, was at this meeting. Who is she and what did she have to say at the meeting?
Guy Marzorati: So Linda Chavez is basically an example of someone who has built political power at the school board level.
Linda Chavez: You are only running against yourself. You can either win or lose. And I guess what I’m like losing. I’m a sore loser. I hate losting, losing if for losers.
Guy Marzorati: She won a seat as a trustee in the Alamo Park Elementary School District on San Jose’s East Side back in 2018. So she’s been kind of a success story of this local conservative movement. When Chavez ran, she had three priorities. Number one, focus on student achievement. Number two, rebuild the trust of our community. And number three, work with everyone toward a common goal. That sounds pretty innocuous. It sounds like, you know, everyone could get behind those three priorities. But when she was speaking at the meeting to potential candidates and talking about why she had run in the first place, she said it was the, quote, gay stuff that was happening in the school district.
Linda Chavez: So I decided I’m going to run. Why? Because they were hurting the children. They had just finished passing all of this stuff. And this is one of the first districts did it. And I looked around and says, this is all going to go this way. Not on my watch.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, Guy, these groups are having meetings like this to try and rally folks of similar minds and goals to run for school board seats. But why school board seats?
Guy Marzorati: I think there’s no doubt that it’s been a national effort among conservatives to build power at the school board level. This is especially a focus in California, because, look, conservatives have not done well electorally in this state writ large. But the thing about school board is it’s not a partizan race. You’re not running with an R next your name or a D next to your name. So the state Republican Party has made a concerted effort to win school board seats, really, because there’s an opening in which conservatives can, you know, get on the ballot in a low information election. It’s not something people are particularly paying attention to and they’re not weighed down by the designation of being a Republican candidate.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, based on what we heard from the meeting, these organizations and these candidates sound very hostile to LGBTQ people. I mean, talking about passing all this, quote unquote, gay stuff. What do these groups have to say about that and what are they advocating for in public?
Guy Marzorati: Yeah, so informed parents of Silicon Valley. Their stated goal is to teach parents about their ability to remove kids from classes they view as inappropriate. And what they’re really targeting is comprehensive sex education, which in California also includes like LGBTQ class, inclusive language, and also HIV AIDS prevention education. That’s really where they’re trying to say, like parents, try to opt your kids out of these classes. And in the case of comprehensive sex ed, these are classes that are required under state law. But the state is also already required to tell parents you have the ability to opt out. So that’s what their stated goal is.
Larry Pegram: We are not involved in politics.
Guy Marzorati: When I interviewed Larry Pegram, who runs a group, he said, Our group is not about politics. We’re not involved in any of this. We’re strictly just to disseminate information.
Larry Pegram: We’re involved in parents rights and the responsibilities of parents to raise their children. I didn’t speak with prospective candidates. I talked about what our organization was doing.
Guy Marzorati: But this meeting offered a really different window into their aims and kind of stated goals.
Larry Pegram: Our organization for Parents of Silicon Valley is dedicated to helping you candidates get elected. That’s that’s what we’re about now. We’re a51 C3 organization. We don’t do this intake. We do not. Endorse any candidate. But people that think like us. We’re an education organization and we can help educate.
Guy Marzorati: Pegram is up there in this meeting giving candidates advice and really talking through how his group and the activities of his group are connected to electing more conservative school board members.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: How successful have they been so far actually gaining ground in Silicon Valley, actually winning school board seats?
Guy Marzorati: Last year, there were four school board candidates that were backed by this Republican women’s group who actually won in the South Bay. So that in itself might be kind of surprising. Like this is a liberal area for school board candidates. One on the other hand, like there are more than a hundred school board members in the South Bay. So the conservative members are making up a pretty small fraction of that. But I would say school boards, it’s in many cases like a five member board. You only have to win a few candidates in a specific district to really exert a lot of control and make a lot of difference on issues like curriculum.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, what happened when San Jose could no longer ignore informed parents of Silicon Valley? Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: This is still the Bay Area and I have to imagine a lot of parents and elected leaders would be pretty angry to hear about these efforts by informed parents. How do people start to become aware of these groups and what they’re doing?
Guy Marzorati: Yes, So informed parents really got on the radar of local elected officials at the start of this school year. You had volunteers with the group going to school sites and handing out leaflets. They look kind of like bookmarks that were encouraging parents to pull their kids out of sex ed. But the bookmarks had really harsh language on them, saying things like, your children are at risk. Schools are teaching gender confusion. And that’s when the backlash against these groups really, you know, kicked off and went to another level.
Guy Marzorati: So a couple weeks ago, the San Jose City Council met to take up a resolution that on its face was about supporting the city’s LGBTQ plus community. But once the discussion really started, it was clear that the real purpose and genesis of this resolution was to denounce the Informed parents group.
Pam Foley: We must not let them win or even think they win. These fliers contain misinformation and hateful dog whistles that target our LGBTQ community.
Guy Marzorati: So you had Pam Foley, a councilmember who co-wrote the resolution, really speaking out about the canvasing activity of inform parents, the ways in which they distributed this literature, the ways in which they described what was happening in schools.
Pam Foley: I’ve asked the clerk to project the two sided pamphlets that were being passed out by these individuals at Bagby. One says Your children are at risk. Talks about teachers indoctrinating children. I was on the school board for 14 years. That isn’t true. And to all the teachers in the room, I know that’s not true. The schools are a safe place.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I know one council member in particular was actually really emotional about this issue. Can you tell me about City council member Omar Torres?
Guy Marzorati: Yeah. Omar Torres is the first openly gay Latino councilmember in San Jose’s history. He also coauthored this resolution. And a few times he just was overwhelmed when he began to speak on this issue.
Omar Torres: I’m trying to regain my composure, though.
Guy Marzorati: I think you had other council members kind of going over to him on the dais and like patting him on the back, consoling him.
Guy Marzorati: Ultimately, he he spoke and he spoke really personally about the issue and the ways in which he sees these efforts by conservative groups as an effort to push LGBTQ students, as he put it, back into the closet.
Omar Torres: As a gay brown male. I’ve experienced the struggle of of of trying to be proud of who I am in the face of adversity. And I stand here crying not only as a council member, but as a human who has been the target of hate solely because of my sexual orientation.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, what ultimately was the result of the meeting and what does it mean exactly?
Guy Marzorati: Ultimately, on a unanimous vote, the council approved this resolution. The meeting itself showed that, you know, these elected officials wanted to put these conservative groups in the spotlight. They wanted to bring out, you know, supporters of the LGBTQ community in the city to speak in public comment, which happens. And I think this is really going to be kind of setting the stage for school board campaigns in 2024, which is perhaps an effort by, you know, allies of the of San Jose’s and the South Bay’s LGBTQ community to really spotlight these school board races and what’s happening in schools. Oftentimes school board elections go under the radar.
Guy Marzorati: And I think the council wanted to make sure they were kind of planting the flag. And to me, it kind of set the stage for the kind of confrontations, because there were folks who came to the meeting and spoke in support of some of these conservative groups, setting up the kind of confrontations we might see on the ballot next year.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, guys, it strikes me that this is sort of, I guess, the Bay Area’s version of what we’ve seen in red states with, you know, the passage of all these anti LGBTQ laws, many of them targeted at schools and kids. And like, what do you think this ultimately means for voters as we were thinking about, you know, 2024?
Guy Marzorati: Yeah, I mean, I think what you’re seeing happening on the school board level in the Bay Area is, you know, in the minds of some just the latest iteration of pushback against the LGBTQ community.
Dr. Melissa Michelson: It’s the same playbook that was used to say gay people are scary. We don’t want people grooming our children to think that they’re gay or lesbian.
Guy Marzorati: I talked to Dr. Melissa Michelson, who is a political science professor at Menlo College, and she laid it out as the latest iteration of the culture wars.
Dr. Melissa Michelson: The culture wars are all about finding that new thing that divides and tries to, you know, to pull away from the opposition’s coalition.
Guy Marzorati: She compared it to, you know, the pushback against gay rights and gay marriage more than a decade ago.
Dr. Melissa Michelson: It’s old, it’s new, and things are always kind of more susceptible to being exploited as a culture war issue when it comes to vulnerable populations like small children.
Guy Marzorati: What’s going on in schools? What books are available in school libraries? What’s the curriculum that’s being taught? How are we treating transgender students? That’s become kind of the new frontier that can inflame parents are ultimately inflame voters.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Guy, thank you so much.
Guy Marzorati: My pleasure.
