Parham’s voting record shows a hostile attitude towards charter schools, parental notification policies, and attempts to foster greater administrative transparency.
It’s a difficult time for the students, parents, teachers, and administrators of Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD). Enrollment is down, funding has been cut, and employees are facing layoffs. There are a variety of factors at play, but one candidate for CUSD Board of Trustees Area 2, Lisa Zollinger, believes the decline of the district is “largely due to the direction the current leadership is going.” Zollinger’s platform includes “[focusing] on academic excellence and [removing] political agendas from the classroom, as well as “[promoting] and [strengthening] the crucial role of parents and guardians as partners in their child’s education.”
In other words, the subject of parental rights is once again a top issue for voters in CUSD—and throughout the nation. Trustee Michael Parham, the incumbent Area 1 representative, must sense it too. While his track record on parental rights is dodgy at best, he and his allies have clearly made a recent effort to position him as a champion for the movement.
A recent mailer, funded by the Capistrano Unified Education Association’s political action committee (HOPE-CUEA PAC), describes Parham as “an advocate of parental rights and strong partnerships between parent, teacher, and community.” It even appears twice—once within a larger paragraph and again as its own bullet point. It’s clear they want parents to see this claim. But how true is it?
In recent years, discussions surrounding parental rights in education have centered on two primary concerns: increasing administrative transparency between parents and schools and expanding educational opportunities—for instance, by approving charters and allowing parents to pursue alternatives to traditional public schools. The latter in particular drives competition which, in turn, can drive improvement in public schools. It is difficult to argue that one could run on a parental choice platform without adhering to these keystone issues.
And yet, that’s exactly the case for Michael Parham.
Last year, the Board of Trustees was presented with a proposed parental notification policy. This common-sense policy would have required school administrators to notify parents or guardians when “they have reasonable cause to believe that doing so will avert a clear and present danger to the health, safety or welfare of the students.” This policy aimed to give parents more insight and control over their children’s well-being and notify them, if for instance, they were asking school administrators to aid them in “socially” transitioning. It would have been an opportunity for Parham to prove he stands with parents. Instead, he voted against it.
“We’ve heard a lot of things, but we haven’t heard negative comments about teachers deliberately not telling you something about your own child,” Parham alleged at the time.
In addition to his failure to back policies that increase parental oversight, Parham has consistently opposed expanding educational choices for families. Over the course of his tenure on the Board of Trustees, he has failed to vote in favor of a single charter school approval.
In fact, despite growing demand for charter schools in CUSD, Parham refuses to budge from siding with the public teachers’ unions that oppose charter school competition.
“Public schools are declining in enrollment,” said Parham during a meeting addressing CUSD’s student exodus. “They’re going to private schools, they’re going to charter schools, or they’re leaving California.”
It is no coincidence that Parham has garnered strong support from the CUEA teachers union, which invests tens of thousands of dollars into the campaigns of anti-charter candidates each cycle. The Association, which represents unionized public school teachers, benefits from helping unions maintain their stranglehold on education.
For reference, in 2016 both the HOPE-CUEA PAC and Gary Pritchard raised a combined $400,000 into a PAC with the verbose title of Yes on Measure M, Save Capistrano Unified School District 2016. Measure M was CUSD’s “billion dollar” bond ($1.8 billion with interest included)—the largest ever proposed in Orange County history. While voters rejected Measure M, it was the start of a mutually-beneficial relationship between CUEA certain members of the Board which continues today.
That year, the PAC donated $15,000 to re-elect CUSD Trustee Amy Hanacek and another $10,000 to Pritchard while Pritchard was both on the Board of Trustees (to which CUEA reports) and the head of a PAC urging for the passage of a bond which would directly affect CUEA. The reciprocal back scratching didn’t end in 2016. In addition to political contributions, CUEA initiates substantial independent expenditures and, evidently, runs mailpieces for its chosen candidates.
And though PAC’s are not allowed to collaborate with the candidates they run IE’s for, it’s apparent that HOPE-CUEA PAC and Parham both agree the best campaign strategy is to run him as a moderate, right-of-center parental choice advocate. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried, either.
In 2022, Parham solicited endorsements from several major conservative organizations in Orange County, hoping that they would unknowingly join public teachers unions in electing an anti-charter candidate. On endorsement applications, Parham claimed to have the support of CUSD Board Members Judy Bullockus and Lisa Davis—the two Trustees who would go on to champion the parental notification policy Parham would kill. This was untrue. That year, Bullockus ran on a slate with Kira Davis—Parham’s challenger for Area 2.
