Redlands School Board Members Get Bullied for Pushing Back on Sexually Explicit Content

By Rebecca Friedrichs and Roger Ruvolo

Notice how easily public education slipped from its original vision to the woke agenda that’s dominant today? And how hard it is now to deconstruct what they’ve imposed, as dramatized in Redlands, Calif.

Three of five members of the Redlands school board have made clear they’ll no longer just rubber-stamp curriculum and book-selection decisions. But the cost is political hatred – statements and actions from foes that vilify, dehumanize and threaten the rebels.

The rubber-stampers have run schools all over California – and many other places nationwide – in recent years. They have allied with the so-called teachers union and the politicians they support.

It’s fair to say the union pretty much owns the politicians. Unionists contribute big bucks to candidates, populate their call centers, walk their precincts. They supply much more than just money, and they supply a great deal of that.

And they’re also, by far, the largest lobbying group in the state.

So if they want to teach sex to little kids, they have all the money and power they need to impose their will and attack anyone who doesn’t like it.

The rebels on the Redlands school board don’t like it.

For months, as they’ve challenged some curricular decisions, they’ve been subjected to intense and intimidating (or bullying) misconduct by their opponents. Let’s just say if this is the left’s idea of civil discourse, then the left doesn’t seriously want civil discourse.

But others are forcing a conversation because the schools are failing children. The social results of this partisan preening have been horrendous in terms of childhood depression/ suicide and academically also disastrous, as test results demonstrate, nationally and in California.

Board members Jeannette Wilson and Candy Olson have read a few books in the Redlands libraries and told colleagues that some of the copy in those books was plainly inappropriate for children. By a 3-2 count, the board OK’d a motion that would make it easier to ban such content from school shelves.

As was true before the vote, a poison-spewing clot of mostly unionists and activists has harassed the board members who backed the complaint policy. After the vote, it has become only more intense, as foes try to discredit and pressure each board member.

The resulting firestorm included board member Melissa Ayala-Quintero’s statement that she is “dispelling rumors” that the Redlands schools teach oral sex.

It’s verbal sleight of hand. Possibly the school district doesn’t give little kids a step-by-step instruction in oral sex. But if it’s not teaching some sort of sex to little kids, it’s violating state law.

AB 329, which in 2016 became the absurdly named “California Healthy Youth Act,” requires sex instruction for children. The younger the better, sponsors say.

The board member “dispelling rumors” is dissembling, saying here’s a specific thing we’re not teaching, but not mentioning myriad other, directly related, things they are teaching.

We err if we think this is just a California phenomenon. In Colorado, a federal judge who bills herself as the first lesbian federal judge west of the Mississippi River, prohibited a school district from removing sexually explicit material because the “board is conservative.”

The Redlands board members are at the vanguard of a movement the establishment wants badly to ignore so it will go away. Doesn’t seem like it’s going away.

Roger Ruvolo is a longtime newspaper editor and a contributor to For Kids & Country.