“We still may seem conservative, but we’re going down a road that I can’t watch anymore,” Lisa Zollinger said.
Before Lisa Zollinger, a longtime South Orange County resident and former elementary school teacher, became active in local government, she, like many Americans, sat outside the arena and hoped good leadership would take care of her everyday needs.
But that all changed in recent years for the mother of five children when she became dissatisfied with her school district’s shift away from Zollinger’s conservative values, which left her feeling unrepresented.
“We’re going down a road that I can’t watch anymore,” Zollinger said. “I still think our schools are phenomenal, and I feel okay to currently speaking highly of them, but I don’t know how much longer I can if we continue to go down this road.”
It’s a path set forth by California lawmakers and the state’s most powerful teacher unions that involves indoctrinating the next generation with far-left ideologies like critical race theory and radical gender theory.
Just this week, Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB1955 into law, which bans schools from making rules requiring parental notification if a child identifies as transgender.
The new law follows several other controversial mandates in schools, including a new approach to teaching students math. Critics speculate that it’s based on increasing racial equity that could lead to a “watering down” of the curriculum and leave students unprepared for college-level mathematics.
And while the Golden State seeks to follow mandates pushed by progressive-leaning interest groups to transform schools with the so-called woke agenda, Zollinger said after seeing how such a curriculum impacted her children and her community, she couldn’t sit back any longer.
“The purpose of the school board is to represent the values of the community,” she said. “And so why would we choose people who are aligned with the teachers union who are very open about what they represent?”
This led her to run for Area 2 of the Capistrano Unified School District school board in California, which is up for general election in November. Zollinger will face Michael Parham, who was first elected to the Board in 2022 for a term ending this year.
If successful, she aims to restore the balance between social justice and academic excellence while representing the values of the community, not the teachers’ union.
She said she is passionate about children’s education, academic excellence, and improving school partnerships by providing more resources and opportunities for parents to get involved.
As a parent, she believes that raising children is the most important responsibility on this earth.
“I can’t think of anything more important, and I would never want to hand that over to the government or the school,” Zollinger said.
