Months After Banning CRT, Temecula Valley USD Board Holds Workshop

Months after banning the teaching of critical race theory, Temecula Valley Unified School District Wednesday held a workshop to “raise awareness of the potential harms of CRT and its associated tenets,” according to the agenda.

Comments from the public ahead of the workshop ranged from the mild— “I view this workshop as an opportunity to listen and learn where the new board members they’re coming from and why they took the action that they took,” Barbara Hale, a member of the Riverside County Board of Education, said — to the impassioned.

“It is widely recognized by the vast majority of experts that bringing CRT into the K-12 classroom is just as outlandish as bringing calculus to the first grade classroom; neither idea is viable or credible,” Deon Hairston, a justice pastor and bible teacher at Rancho Christian School, said. “Therefore, it is asinine to ban CRT when it isn’t even taught in any K-12 classroom in the United States of America. Your continued blatant, willful ignorance of the Black experience in this country is not only shameful, but also detrimental to the education and growth of our children.”

Following Hairston’s comments, a white woman told him to leave the country as he returned to his seat, to which he responded, “My family has been here since August of 1619,” in reference to the first slave ship from Africa to arrive in the United States.

Video posted to social media has since gone viral.

Board President Joseph Komrosky asked sheriff’s deputies to escort the man out of the room, which caused a group of people in attendance to demand that the woman also be removed by chanting things like, “Do your job,” “Get her out,” “Shame on you,” and “Gavel her.”

“If you would like, the whole auditorium can leave,” Komrosky said. “We need order in the building or I’ll let everybody leave.”

He then called for a 10-minute recess as Board member Allison Barclay objected.

“Joe, that is, Joe,” she said. “I object to that, if this woman said that to him, she needs to be excused.”

Another video posted to social media shows Temecula City Council member Jessica Alexander, seated in the front row, telling Komrosky not to remove the woman from the meeting.

“Joe, don’t do it,” she can be heard saying. “Don’t kick her out. Nope.”

Alexander was between Orange County Board of Education Trustee Mari Barke and Murrieta Valley Unified School District Trustee Nicolas Pardue, who was also saying the woman should not be removed.

“Send the mob out,” he can be heard saying. “They’ve disrupted the meeting the whole time.”

From the dais, Board member Jennifer Wiersma could be heard telling Komrosky that they needed to “ask for them to be quiet so we can take care of it.”

After a tense couple of minutes, the video of the verbal altercation shows the woman getting up and walking out, to which a loud round of applause erupted.

At the same time, Komrosky again called for a 10 minute recess, which then turned into a more than 30 minute recess after board members Allison Barclay and Steven Schwartz walked out of the room, leaving the board without a quorum.

The meeting continued after Board member Danny Gonzalez arrived from an open house event for his children and Barclay rejoined the board members at the table. Gonzalez later thanked the board, the panelists and the audience for allowing him to be late to the meeting so he could be there for his family.

The workshop portion of the meeting included a panel moderated by Esther Valdes Clayton, an immigration attorney and former president of the Coronado Unified School District, and featured the following panelists: 

• Walter H. Myers III, an adjunct professor at Biola University and principal engineering manager at Microsoft;
• Brandy Shufutinsky, the director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values;
• Wenyuan Wu, the executive director at Californians for Equal Rights;
• Joe Nalven, former associate director of the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University; and 
• Chris Arend, former board president of the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District.

TVUSD recently approved a $15,000 contract with Arend for him to conduct six two-hour sessions over the course of two days that discuss the history of critical race theory and the board’s December resolution prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory. That resolution is largely identical to a resolution the board of the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District adopted in June 2021 when Arend was board president.

During the first part of the workshop, each panelist was given roughly 15 minutes to talk about their background in critical race theory and why they felt it was not suitable to be taught in K-12 classrooms, something the board and Arend acknowledged multiple times was not being taught in TVUSD classrooms.

“I don’t think it’s happening in your school district; I haven’t seen any evidence of it,” Arend said. “One of the reasons this resolution was passed was as a preventive measure to make sure that it doesn’t creep its way into your school district; That’s why we also passed it in Paso Robles to keep it out.”

During the workshop, Barclay brought up that all of the panelists were in general agreement that critical race theory is deeply flawed and should not be used as a framework for understanding history, and asked why other viewpoints were not included.

“There are lots of other people that when I asked if I could add someone to the panel, I was told no, and so that’s another concern that I have that a lot of my constituents have brought to me,” she said. “I mean, I’ve never received as many emails as I’ve received in the last two weeks on this subject, asking when can we hear other points of view that we were not allowed to have here?”

Komrosky responded that the district had already banned critical race theory, therefore there was no debate to be had.

Barclay also noted that the resolution banning critical race theory was passed 3-2 — with Komrosky, Wiersma and Gonzalez voting in favor of the resolution — at the same meeting in which they were sworn in.

“The board majority passed a resolution that had no community input, was not vetted by our attorneys, no board discussion,” she said. “We had over 500 people attending that meeting, and it lasted 8.5 hours.”

Barclay said that, since that Dec. 13 meeting, the board has met four times and heard 78 public comments opposing issues proposed by the new board members and there have been at least five student-led walkouts protesting board decisions.

“We sadly have a social media war happening right now in our community where people have felt threatened, harassed, intimidated, including children in our own district [who] have felt threatened, intimidated and harassed by adults,” she said. “We had over 200 of our educators attending a learning session that cost the district at least $35,000 for the speaker, plus the substitute teachers, where they listened to a presenter informing them, and I did hear this, I wrote down this quote that, ‘Racism isn’t a big problem in America anymore.’”

She also said that security costs for meetings had increased in the last three months from an average of about $740 per meeting to an approximately $3,500 per meeting.

“We’re wasting our time and money on a non-issue,” she said. “This is a political agenda item that was popularized during a political campaign as an issue to raise fear. It has no basis of fact, and dismisses a host of research and lived experiences.”

Komrosky ended the meeting by stating that critical race theory was “un-American” and “causes harm to people.”

“It has an intrinsic evil because it undermines somebody’s inherent worth,” he said. “It’s in our Pledge of Allegiance, we’re indivisible. This divides, therefore, it’s un-American, and it’s gone.

“So that’s just another justification of why we’re sitting here tonight,” he continued. “We are Americans, which should not be divided, and it’s divisive, and that’s it.”

A recording of the workshop can be found here on the district’s YouTube page.