“If Ms. Page and Mr. Goodlander were in a romantic relationship at the time the CBA was negotiated and approved, there is significant likelihood that confidential closed session material was revealed to Mr. Goodlander, and Ms. Page should have recused herself from voting to approve the CBA,” said attorney Julie Hamill.
In 2022, Trustee Ana Page was a dissenting voice on the Orange Unified School District (OUSD)’s conservative majority. The district was in decent financial shape, Page was married with two children, and so was Greg Goodlander, President of the Orange Unified Education Association (OUEA). The two knew one another, but it’s unclear how intimately.
Fast forward to today. Page and Goodlander have divorced their former spouses and are now married to each other. OUSD’s leading conservatives were ousted via a union-led recall effort, and union allies now control all seven seats. Goodlander got a nearly 10% raise for teachers represented by OUEA—despite districtwide financial concerns—and trustees like Page are collecting monthly stipends nearly triple what they were even last year.
In many ways, the couple appears to have leveraged their positions to achieve a picture-perfect fairy tale ending—for themselves and their allies.
As for the school district itself, there’s no happy ending. Presently, OUSD is in dire financial straits.
This is the story of how two star-crossed lovers got their happily-ever-after.
2023: A Recall Initiated
From late 2022 through 2023, Page served as part of a three-member minority bloc on the board alongside Andrea Yamasaki and Kris Erickson. That coalition opposed the district’s conservative majority consisting of Angie Schlueter-Rumsey, John Ortega, Madison Miner, and Rick Ledesma.
The latter two became the subject of a recall effort spearheaded by OUEA. As previously mentioned, Greg Goodlander was serving as President of the union. Among the actions cited as having triggered the recall was the decision to fire then-Superintendent Gunn Marie Hansen—as well as passing a parents’ bill of rights, which “[granted] district parents and guardians the right to know what their children are being taught and the right to be heard by district leaders.”
Union advocates argued this parental notification policy constituted “forced outing” of gay or trans students and thus became a catalyst to activate LGBTQ+ groups to mobilize against Ledesma and Miner. At the time, Trustee Miner rejected the argument and said the recall was blatantly part of the union’s “quest for power” over the district.
Miner also attests that Page participated in a staged walk-out—in coordination with OUEA—to avoid having to actually vote against the parental notification policy. While this doesn’t confirm that Goodlander and Page had any relationship at this time, it does suggest a history of cooperation between Page and the union going back at least to 2023.
In either case, the “Yes” campaign—backed by the union’s coffers—outraised and outspent those opposing the recall. A special election would be held in March 2024 to determine the fate of the Board.
2024: A Board Flipped
March came—and with it, an electoral victory for OUEA. Miner and Ledesma were removed, flipping the Board from a 4-3 conservative majority to a 2-3 conservative minority with two open seats. This was the first successful recall effort in the district since 2001.
Seeing an opportunity to immediately seize and consolidate power, emboldened Trustees Page, Yamasaki, and Erickson voted to remove Ortega as President a mere one month after the recall. Page was appointed to lead the Board.
President Page and the new majority wasted no time in filling the two vacancies—they needed only find two candidates who would vote in lockstep with OUEA. In May, the Board appointed Sara Pelly and Stephen Glass as provisional trustees to fill Areas 4 and 7 respectively. As such, the Board’s two remaining conservatives found themselves outnumbered by five staunch union acolytes.
Only one month later, in June, President Page and her colleagues voted to approve a 9.75% salary increase for teachers, negotiated by OUEA under Goodlander’s leadership.
Almost immediately, OUSD administrators admitted—at least internally—that this was killing the district’s financial health. In a memo submitted to district officials in September, assistant superintendent Sulema Holguin reported that OUSD was now tapping into its reserves.
“It appears that the adopted budget in June did not fully account for the ongoing costs of the raises,” said Holguin. “Updating the budget projections to reflect the cost of the raises appears to require that some of the reserves will need to be used to meet our obligations,” she wrote in the same memo. “In other words, it appears that we are deficit spending—spending more money than we are receiving.”
Two months later, Superintendent Ernest Gonzalez—who had only been in the position for around eighteen months—resigned. Many parents took the news as an ill omen.
2025: A Love Consecrated
In January 2025, Goodlander resigned as OUEA President, citing a need to “focus on family.” Public records revealed he and his wife had filed for divorce only twelve days prior. A few weeks later, in February, Trustee Page publicly announced that she and Goodlander were together.
“I understand there has been some speculation regarding my relationship status,” Page acknowledged in her post. “I have recently started a profound relationship with Greg Goodlander, and I want to assure everyone that there is no conflict of interest or political involvement.”
Evidently, the public was not convinced of that.
“What a big fat conflict of interest,” commented social media user Marie Silva. “What a clown show this OUSD Board has become.”
Three months later, in May, the two were married. Page now goes by Ana Martinez Goodlander.
To say this development raised eyebrows is an understatement. Confirmation of their sudden and out-of-seemingly-nowhere romantic relationship led many to wonder and scrutinize to what extent the two worked together the year prior, while Page was President over a Board that had just approved dramatic pay raises—at great detriment to the district’s finances, no less.
“In light of the ‘profound’ relationship between Board President Ana Page and recently-resigned Union President Greg Goodlander, there are serious concerns regarding Brown Act violations arising from communications of confidential information obtained by Ms. Page in closed session to Mr. Goodlander, as well as concerns regarding a potential conflict of interest in connection with Ms. Page’s June 13, 2024 vote on the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between OUSD and OUEA,” California Policy Center attorney Julie Hamill wrote in an email to district officials.
Hamill cited Government Code Section 1090 which “prohibits an officer, employee, or agency from participating in making government contracts in which the official or employee within the agency has a financial interest.”
“If Ms. Page and Mr. Goodlander were in a romantic relationship at the time the CBA was negotiated and approved, there is significant likelihood that confidential closed session material was revealed to Mr. Goodlander, and Ms. Page should have recused herself from voting to approve the CBA,” said attorney Julie Hamill.
Some allege this is the real reason Goodlander stepped down from his position. Political commentator Kira Davis shared a tip from a trusted insider at OUEA who claimed “Greg didn’t step down voluntarily. He was given the option to step down or be fired because OUEA found out about things he was doing.”
If there’s anyone who wasn’t surprised about Page’s affair with Goodlander, it would be Guillermo Vera—now publicly identified as the father of Page’s two children, but not her husband. Her husband at the time was Collin Page, on whom she cheated through an affair with Vera, resulting in the birth of their first child in or around 2010.
Critics, including former Trustee Madison Miner, have called Page a “serial cheater,” as the alleged cheating did not stop with Vera.
Vera has alleged that after their daughter was born, he discovered text messages indicating Page’s intent to pursue yet another affair with a new man. Vera says Page responded by filing a faulty domestic violence complaint—an action Page herself later apologized for and described as “cowardly.”
The two would go on to have a second daughter together, but Vera now claims Page has been uncooperative in facilitating his court-ordered visitation and has ignored repeated attempts to communicate.
“Did you start ignoring me because of your relationship with Greg Goodlander?” he asked via text—a message he has since shared publicly. “Did you think it was convenient to start ignoring me so you could replace me with a married man that already had a family of his own? What is going on with this?”
Despite immediate calls from concerned parents for OUSD to investigate the two, such an investigation was—as far as can be told—never conducted.
“Nobody is talking about this scandalous affair—not the school district, not the school board, not the school board president, Kris Erickson, and certainly not Ana Page. In fact, the only reason Guillermo found out about this new man in his child’s life is because of social media.”
“Once I started to see the details, I said ‘I’m not surprised,’” said Vera. “Once you expose her, she’ll just dig her head in the sand. That’s how she’s always been.”
2026: A District Adrift
It’s now been roughly a year since Page (now Martinez Goodlander) announced her affair to the world. By all accounts, she and her husband got through the year rather unscathed. That fact alone has drawn ire in some circles, but the fact remains that Page shirked a formal investigation, a Brown Act violation, and any other subsequent consequence.
She even recently gave herself—and her fellow Trustees—a nearly threefold raise to their monthly stipend. A success story if ever there was one.
The district, however, does not fare so well. Reserves have been tapped. Teachers and Trustees have demanded more funds. Enrollment continues to fall with no signs of stopping. That translates to less funding from the state. The Board has had to consider school mergers.
Union activists and Goodlander himself insisted that “transparency” was a central reason why trustees Ledesma and Miner needed to be recalled. But has the newly installed board been any more transparent? Where is the transparency around Page and Goodlander’s personal relationship—two supposed bedfellows who sat on opposite ends of the negotiating table, deciding what should be done with taxpayer funds?
Not only has that relationship never been meaningfully examined in open session or by an independent body, but none of the union activists or trustees who once shouted for clarity have demanded any answers now that the shoe is on the other foot.
Where are their cries for transparency now?
