I’m a lifelong resident and small businessman in East County. My wife and I have three sons who have grown up in the Cajon Valley School District attending Blossom Valley Elementary & Los Coches Creek Middle School, our oldest is now a freshman at El Capitan.

As your schoolboard trustee I will focus on: promoting academics, athletics, & electives rather than social experiments, district governance which is transparent and consistent with student & parent rights, and fiscal policy that funds classrooms first & addresses the deferred maintenance at our schools. I will also focus on keeping Critical Race Theory (and its many derivatives) and radical gender ideology out of our schools.

Many of us thought that school would go “back to normal” when the lockdowns and mask mandates ended. Instead the pandemic has been used to award our tax dollars, without bid nor past performance, to radical groups like San Diego Youth services, who are slated to conduct a novel mental health study on all pre-K thru 3rd graders, starting at 4 schools in the Cajon Valley district. This summer, San Diego Youth Services hosted an event which they advertised to kids, called “Let’s talk Trans(istioning)” in a room they call “our safe place.” Their website advertises psychiatric services including “medication management” for children who are transitioning genders, SDYS also provides “gender affirming supplies” to children. 4-9 year olds are too little to be subjected to a study by a group like this, especially since SDYS has ZERO experience conducting mental health studies. What’s worse SDYS is proposing to use the results of their yet to be created screenings, to make mental health referrals of young children. SDYS has a glaring conflict of interest since they also provide the “mental health services” that they’d be referring children to. There’s been no demonstrated benefit and no demonstration that this novel study/referral scheme wouldn’t cause harm in this age group. The proposed agreement between SDYS and Cajon Valley seeks to bypass “informed consent” from parents which is wildly offensive to parent and student rights. As your school board trustee, I would assert the rights of parents to provide “informed consent” before their children are enrolled in studies like this, to be more consistent with state and federal laws on informed consent, CA Ed Code 51513, and the Protection of Pupil Rights Act (PPRA). As a parent in this district, I have been working with our community and communicating with members of our school board for the past 6 months to oppose this compulsory study. There were two groups who came before SDYS in the Spring of 2022 who were slated to conduct a similar study (the school board approved their $3MM proposal) but fortunately, they were sent packing back to New York after I pointed out the issues to the board and our community. Unfortunately, this study was immediately replaced by SDYS’s proposed study, and that’s where we are today, the study was set to begin July 1st, but has been delayed thus-far, thankfully.

Another group, the Community Engagement Initiative (CEI) operates on the principals of Critical Race Theory, they have a 6 part webinar series on their website where they tell the story of how the Community Engagement Initiative was used in Oakland, CA High Schools to get police officers off all campuses, the video says they are proud of a deep and rich history of political activism (this is part of a broader movement to turn students into political activists, for one side, in the classroom). Cajon Valley’s community engagement program uses a handout that identifies so-called “problems of practice,” here are some quotes: “Lack of understanding of historic and systemic racism and inequities, white supremacy & privilege” “Fear of too much focus on minority groups, not all students (fear of backlash from priveleged)” “The system teaches new teachers how to teach children, but they teach them as if all students are the same (socioeconomic, rich, white, etc.)” <end quotes>

These claims are made without evidence, so allowing them to form the basis for a family and community engagement initiative, by our district, is inappropriate. The statute which created the California Community Engagement Initiative in 2018 was about parents being able to hold their districts accountable for academic performance, and districts working to increase clear communication with all student’s families. Like SEL (Social Emotional Learning), CEI has been hijacked by a radical ideology which seeks to launder its hack theories into our classrooms.

Students and families have many protections under state and federal law to thwart groups like this from conducting their social experiments. The only people working in the district who are charged with advocating for student and family rights are school board members. I will take the time to review policies and programs and check for apparent inconsistencies with student and parent rights. I will work to get us back to the basics, for example: nobody at the district seems to kow when the septic systems (some of which are showing obvious issues) at Rios, Los Coches Creek and Blossom Valley Elementary were last pumped and inspected, which should happen every few years, there are major trip hazards (i.e. ground squirrel holes in the asphalt on the playground, buckled concrete in walkways, etc.) these “nuts and bolts” functions have taken a back to seat to exponentially increasing travel, conference, & event budgets for boardmembers and administrators, along with unproven and massively expensive initiatives, all while academic performance in our district severely declines relative to other districts in this state (which is a low bar to begin with).