“If they can succeed here in Orange then they know they can go to other districts and do the same thing,” said OUEA executive director Roger Urroz Jr. regarding the CTA’s interest in flipping OUSD’s Board of Trustees.
It’s been nearly two years since the successful recall of Orange Unified School District (OUSD) Trustees Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner. And yet, after all this time, there is still much that the general public does not know. One of the prevailing myths touted by the recall’s architects is that the recall itself was a grassroots movement—a largely “parent-led and teacher-supported” initiative.
To be fair, some did try to sound the alarm, including California Policy Center’s then-President Will Swaim.
“Union activists packed school board meetings, shouting down conservative trustees and parents—and then blamed the board for the chaos. Behind the scenes, district documents show, the real purpose of the recall was to replace conservative board members with union-friendly trustees who would approve [a] salary hike [for teachers].”
Indeed, it was obvious then and is even more obvious now that the entire effort was orchestrated by unions: namely the Orange Unified Education Association (OUEA) and the California Teachers Association (CTA), the latter of which boasts an estimated annual revenue of $356.3 million.
“As much as [OUEA] attempted to camouflage the recall as a grassroots effort, it’s clear that union money was paramount—including money from CTA’s political action committee, Association for Better Citizenship,” wrote Swaim back in December of 2024.
The powerful statewide CTA has a long track record of shaping local school board races across California in a “nakedly partisan” manner—which often includes flipping entire school boards by ousting democratically elected trustees and replacing them with pro-union advocates. That’s exactly what happened in OUSD.
CTA and OCEA formed a coalition of political activists, teamsters, and elected officials in collaboration with Supporters of Public Education-OC (SOPE-OC), a club chartered with the Democratic Party of Orange County. Participants in strategy discussions reportedly included union-allied OUSD Trustee Kris Erickson, OUEA President Greg Goodlander (who in the span of barely half a year negotiated a massive pay raise for teachers, divorced his wife, and married future OUSD Trustee Ana Page, who was also on the call), OUEA executive director Roger Urroz Jr., then-State Senator Josh Newman, Tustin USD Trustee Allyson Muñiz Damikolas, STA representatives, and other left-wing activists.
SOPE-OC was one platform through which pro-recall activists plotted how they would secure union funding, coordinate messaging, mobilize volunteers, and strategize how to frame the recall publicly.
During their April 2, 2023 virtual meeting—which begins with an announcement for a drag queen story hour at Irvine Congregational Church and a $100 award for the teacher who brings the most elementary school students (pre-schoolers were also welcome)—OUEA’s Urroz Jr. said he had “already been in contact with the higher-ups at CTA. The officers are aware of what’s going on in Orange. They are very concerned.” This is something Swaim mentioned well over a year ago in his OC Register piece, adding that the California Policy Center had obtained a video recording that the recall campaign was coordinated with CTA.
Completely independently, through our own investigation and no contact with CPC, we at California Courier found the same video evidence. We can therefore corroborate Swaim’s claim that “state union leaders saw the Orange school board takeover as a kind of test for future efforts all over California,” and that Urroz Jr. said the following: “They’re seeing it as ‘Orange is the pilot,’ if you will: if they can succeed here in Orange then they know they can go to other districts and do the same thing.”
“We’ve got to protect public education,” Newman said during the meeting. “It is ground zero in the culture wars.”
At one point, former Irvine Teachers Association president Teri Sorey asked Trustee Erickson if she would like to add anything, noting “I know you’re limited” in what could be said as an elected official.
Throughout the meeting, CTA representatives ask various variations of “what do you need?” —presumably referring to additional funding and resources.
“We feel super supported by CTA and OUEA,” said activist Darshan Smaaladen.
Notably, Smaaladen is the first donor listed on the campaign site for Sara Pelly, one of the union-picked candidates who ran later in 2024 and was later elected to the Board of Trustees. This public contribution list includes the names of many individuals with known union ties.
Swaim quotes Smaaladen as having told the Voice of OC that she “[looks] forward to a time where school board meetings can be boring again, with a board that is focused on the financial health of our district.”
Fast forward to the present day. OUSD meetings are neither boring nor focused on financial health. Rather, OUSD’s 7-0 pro-union majority has overseen a financial crisis due to a decline in student enrollment, a roughly 10% salary spike for teachers, and a threefold increase to the Trustees’ monthly stipends.
And, as predicted by Swaim over a year ago, the new Board did “hire a new superintendent who shares the board’s loyalty to the teacher union.” Self-proclaimed “social justice leader” Rachel Monárrez was that candidate.
Either Will Swaim is a modern-day Nostradamus—or the union playbook was, and is, plainly obvious.
Perhaps, for that reason, the remarks made during the SOPE-OC, especially those concerning the future, deserve to be taken extremely seriously. If the recall in OUSD was indeed “the pilot,” and the pilot got the unions the exact outcome they were looking for, then it’s not unreasonable to assume the same fate will befall other districts in the near future.
One can argue that’s what’s already begun to unfold in Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District (PYLUSD). Mere months after the OUSD recall, local unions like The Association of Placentia-Linda Educators (APLE) with the aid of CTA coalesced support behind three candidates: incumbent Marilyn Anderson and challengers Tricia Quintero and Misty Janssen. Their goal was once again to disrupt the Board’s narrow conservative majority.
This time around, however, they were not successful. While Quintero and Anderson won their elections, Janssen failed to defeat the highly popular Trustee Leandra Blades, an incumbent and conservative firebrand. Having failed to unseat her, union activists and their allies have had Blades in their crosshairs ever since. Most recently, union proxy groups have staged mass walkout protests over PYLUSD’s cooperation with ICE and have distributed signs with messages like “fuck Leandra Blades.”
“I’m glad the community has realized they’ve been lied to by the… social media sites who are proxies for the Democrat party and teachers union,” said Blades. “Now you can see with your own eyes they’ll use lies and outside agitators to disrupt our community. This is all coordinated and well funded.”
Whether it’s happening in OUSD, PYLUSD, or anywhere else, it would seem that parents are catching on to how and why unions orchestrate these coordinated efforts to eliminate elected officials who would stand against their will. As one member of a PYLUSD community group puts it: “The union utilizes membership dues for recalls on board members who do not comply with their rules and beliefs.”
“Board members who oppose the union may face efforts to remove them from their positions,” Nellie Hayek-Rofaeel noted. “The union opposes district-run charter schools as they cannot control the curriculum.”
“The Union advocates for pushing control over school policies and disregarding parental input,” she continued. “They aim to remove parental notifications and introduce divisive curriculum, straying from basic education principles… Our children rely on us, as parents, to make informed decisions that will impact their education and future.”
