TEMECULA, Calif. — School board meetings in Temecula Valley haven’t always been filled with shouting, gavel-thumping, and ejections, but tensions and tempers have been high over the past year and a half.

Kristi McClure, who frequently attends and speaks at the meetings, finds it disappointing. She has two kids in the district and two stepdaughters who graduated from the school.  

The schools are the main reason she moved here.

“You get the quality of a private school education in Temecula in the public school system,” she said.

But she worries the current discourse is negatively impacting the district as a whole, saying, “I think it’s undermining the trust in the teachers and the staff at the schools.”

She’s referring to the highly contentious debate that’s broken out over some curricula. 

In 2022, the school board, which had three newly elected conservative members, approved a resolution to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or CRT, a mostly college-level study that examines systemic racism and bias. At the time of the ban, CRT was not being taught in any of the district’s K-12 schools. 

The board also had objections to a new social studies curriculum that mentioned Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California. 

At one meeting, school board President Joseph Komrosky, who is currently facing a recall effort, said, “My question is why even mention a pedophile?”

McClure, who grew up in the Bay area, then wrote to her local board member to express her support for including Milk in the curriculum.

“If you don’t want your kid exposed to it, your solution is to remove it from everybody, including my kid,” she said. “My solution involves it being available, but it means you’re getting offended. How do you reconcile this?”

The district ultimately approved the new textbooks after Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to fine them for being out of compliance with state educational standards. 

It was a move that father of four Daniel Molina sees as an overreach.

“Local control is more important than anything because the community should feel represented and we should have a say with how our children receive their education,” he said.

“It does feel like there isn’t much local say in California,” he added.

He also supports the resolution banning CRT, which is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit. So does mother of two Cole Everi Mann who says CRT just creates division.

She described CRT as “teaching racism rather than just the historical events of our American past,” adding, “Segregating kids within the curriculum is just not the way to bring kids together.”

Cole is a graduate of TVUSD schools and finds the current dialogue disheartening and, she says, a little hateful. She’s even explored the possibility of running for one of the vacant seats on the board. She believes parents should be allowed to be involved as much or as little as they want in crafting the curriculum.  

“I think actually just opening up that communication individually per school site is the best way to do that,” she explained, “so that parents can either interject themselves into that and participate or say, hey, you know what? I trust you guys. You do your thing.”

However, the father of two, Dave Berry, worries that teachers are already afraid to “do their thing” given the language of the CRT ban, which details what can and cannot be taught.

“It causes the teachers to walk on eggshells,” Berry said. “I think they can’t effectively do their job.”

What also concerns him is the use of the phrase “parental rights” which he says sounds good on the surface.

“But the things they have done so far have done nothing to improve the education of our kids or enhance the educational opportunities of our kids,” he explained. “They’ve only taken away things from our kids, like freedoms and rights.”

With one teenager and one preschool-aged child, he worries about what this will mean for the future of the district and the education his youngest will receive.

Molina has a different view.

“Parental rights,” he countered, “is just about community transparency between the public school and the community that school serves.”

He and Mann do not support the recall. Berry and McClure do. But while they may see eye to eye on very little, these parents agree on one thing: the community needs to find a way to move past this. 

Their kids’ education depends on it.