Across San Diego, school board candidates make fight over ‘parental rights’ part of their platform

Alex Welling, who’s running for Cajon Valley school board, says he and other parents who have advocated for their rights in the district have been labeled “Nazis” and “the peanut gallery.”

But Welling told inewsource he doesn’t see it that way; instead, he’s fighting to ensure parents have a say in their child’s education and upbringing while at school. 

Parents should have the right to contribute to curriculum decisions, opt their child out of certain topics such as sex education and be notified by the school if their child is gender transitioning, Welling said. 

“There’s this distrust right now between parents and teachers, and I don’t think that that’s fair,” he said. “I think the issue of the trust is between parents and the people making the policy decisions.”

He’s not alone in his thinking.

From Oceanside to Cajon Valley to Chula Vista, school board candidates across San Diego County are making the fight for and against what’s been described as “parental rights” part of their platforms.

The loose term has evolved since it gained ground nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, when remote learning provided parents with further insight into what their kids were learning and disagreement about mandated masks and vaccines ignited. While frustrations over pandemic policies have cooled down locally, debate over what schools teach students about race, gender and sexual orientation have flared up.

Parents and school officials have been at odds over student privacy policies, especially those that exclude parents.

That tension is driving the recent parental rights effort, a “vague term” that could broaden its appeal, said Julie Marsh, an education policy professor at the University of Southern California.

“It’s intentionally vague as a political strategy, because I think in its ambiguity it can attract a lot of support and could be seen as a nonpartisan issue,” Marsh said.

But the effort stems from a politically conservative pitch first to voters in the southern U.S. and has transformed into a national issue that’s making its way down to local school boards.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, was among the first elected officials to successfully use parental rights as part of his campaign during the wake of the pandemic, touting that parents should have a greater say in what happens in schools and how their children are educated, Marsh said.

Since then, the term has been a talking point for other politicians like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and now local candidates, she said. It’s also a part of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nearly 1,000-page plan that serves as a conservative guidebook for a massive overhaul of the federal government.

“I think people started to see the political power of the idea, right? So that if a group of frustrated families and parents could help elevate a governor to an elected position, then how more could we sort of stretch it?” Marsh said.

Marsh said what issues are considered part of parents’ rights are expanding — helping tap into the broader ideological issues of concern and not only capture the large voting bloc of parents, but also suburban voters. 

School boards have long been sites where culture wars unfold and where society works out broad issues, including teaching evolution and issues around segregation, Marsh said.

Parents also have long demanded that their values and perspectives be considered in how their children are taught. They’re already able to opt their children out of certain curriculum, for example.

But what’s new and what’s being “contested is the extent to which these rights should be expanded,” Marsh said. 

“I think what’s different here is that board members and others are proposing policies that are blanket, that would affect all parents,” she said. “So rather than it being an opt out, you’re just saying, ‘OK, now no one in the school should be able to read that book, for example.” 

Outrage over these issues has led to calls for curriculum transparency and has led some school districts such as Ramona Unified to alter some of its teaching on race. 

Those efforts have continued into this year’s school board races.

Sharmane Estolano, a candidate for the Chula Vista Elementary School District board, said parents should have the right to align their child’s curriculum with their family’s beliefs at home. Estolano said schools should not be focused on a small section of the student population, such as incorporating books in which boys are “wearing a dress” into lessons.

“I don’t know if the classroom is the best place for those lessons in an elementary school setting,” she said. “If it’s that important, then maybe it should be a separate curriculum for after school, extra credit, summer classes, but not in the day-to-day curriculum.”

In Lakeside, Autumn Ellenson, an incumbent running for reelection, said she wants to support students in ways that are key to their learning, such as ensuring their safety and having family be an integral part of their education. She said she wants to push back against laws in California that are being “touted” as protections for children but include loopholes, including the right for a child’s mental health records and other medical documents to be kept confidential from their parents. 

Ellenson said she personally experienced the inability to access her child’s mental health records and believes children may not receive the appropriate services if parents are cut off.

“The only way that we can solve problems and really help support students is by having open communication,” Ellenson said, adding her desire to come up with solutions that protect every child, not just a small number of students.

But other candidates have pushed back on parental rights in their own campaigns. 

Jay Steiger, who’s running for a seat on the Grossmont Union High School District board, said schools should provide curriculum that reflects the diversity of society because students do better when they can see themselves in what they’re learning. It’s critical to move away from “extremist politics” that try to “other” children and staff, he said. 

“You as a parent have the right to tell your kid, ‘hey, I don’t want you to read that.’ You don’t have the right to take it from the library,” Steiger said. 

Parental rights challenge student privacy

California laws weigh in favor of protecting student privacy, but several lawsuits filed by parents and teachers over the last two years seek to challenge that, with some school districts pushing the envelope in favor of parents.

Last year, two Escondido Union teachers filed a lawsuit alleging that the district’s policy, which protects a student’s gender identity from being disclosed, violated their First Amendment right because they are required to “participate in the exclusion of parents from any decision-making regarding a child’s ‘social transition.’” The law firm representing the district attempted to have the case dismissed, arguing that the policy doesn’t require teachers to “lie,” but U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez denied the motion and granted the teacher’s preliminary injunction.

The judge found that the district’s policy requires teachers to mislead parents by pointing them to administrators for information about their child’s gender identity despite the information being “impossible for parents to obtain” from them. 

Despite the preliminary ruling, California passed the SAFETY Act in July, which bans school districts from requiring employees to notify parents if their child is gender transitioning without the child’s consent. 

Some school districts in San Diego County, such as Cajon Valley and Lakeside Union, have mirrored efforts by House Republicans, who last year passed a parent’s rights bill that reaffirms rights parents already had, such as the right to review the curriculum their child is taught. 

But these school districts have taken it one step further to include a policy that goes against the SAFETY Act, requiring administrators to notify parents if their child is requesting to identify as a different gender than what’s listed on their official district records. 

“I don’t think anybody should be in a position of keeping secrets from parents,” Trustee Ellenson said.

Members from the Lakeside Union District have since joined the Escondido lawsuit and are being represented pro bono by the Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based national Catholic Christian not-for-profit law firm focused on defending “fundamental rights to life, family and freedom.”

“I’m trying to be somebody who ensures everybody’s heard, everybody’s protected, but also advocate for my constituents,” said Lakeside Board President Andrew Hayes, during a parental rights town hall at a public library in August. Hayes, a Republican, is running for the state Assembly this year.

“And my constituents in this district have great concern about not being a part of their kids’ education.”  

Opposing candidates seek unity

Although parental rights issues can be polarizing, school board candidates from both sides of the coin say they have what it takes to balance the differing opinions and unite in their district community.   

Grossmont’s Steiger said parents have the right to opt their child out of certain topics and that he’s open to listening to people who have different opinions than him. 

“I think we can find a balance to where we can have the space for discussion, the space for disagreement, make it respectful, but also recognize that one person’s disagreement doesn’t mean they get to decide for every other person,” Steiger said, adding that if elected he would set up office hours to hear from constituents. 

In El Cajon, Welling hopes to create advisory committees that include teachers, administrators and community members to help reach agreement on several topics, including curriculum. Welling, who works as a communications manager for SDG&E, pointed to his experience of building consensus among the public on difficult topics and said he could help do that for the school district.

“I want to build agreement among all parties, all stakeholders. I want to bring us together so we can really forget about the politics and focus on the true beneficiaries of the work that we’re doing, and that is our students,” Welling said.

It remains unseen whether parental rights issues will drive large groups of voters to the polls. But there are signs that the effort for the cause won’t be without challenge.

During the last set of elections, the success rate of candidates who have been endorsed by Moms for Liberty, a nationwide group of community members in favor of parental rights, has generally been on the decline. Elsewhere in Southern California, some candidates who have also expressed support for parental rights have been recalled.

This trend tells us that the parental rights effort may be “waning,” Marsh said. When the effort originally started there was a lot less attention on the issue, but now groups have organized in opposition, she said.

“It’ll be interesting to see what happens there when we have higher turnout” in the general election, Marsh said.

Election day is Nov. 5. 

Editor’s note: This story was supported with funding from the
Data-Driven Reporting Project. The Data-Driven Reporting Project is funded by
the Google News Initiative in partnership with Northwestern University | Medill.