A number of students pushed back against the proposed policy, begging the school board to focus on actual issues — like their broken air-conditioning and spotty WiFi — instead of culture war politics.
“It feels like the people who are supposed to support our education system are failing us,” one student said.
Despite pushback from students, teachers, parents, and community members, the Chino Valley Board of Education voted 4-1 to pass the policy.
Shaw did not respond to emails seeking comment on this story.
A Growing Trend in Suburbia
What happened in Chino Valley Unified is just one example of how Christian nationalists, like Hibbs, encourage their followers to target school boards and support far-right candidates and policies across the U.S.
Jorge Reyes Salinas, spokesperson for the civil rights organization Equality California, said that conservatives see these local school boards as their opportunity to “increase leverage and representation in government because they know they can’t do that statewide.”
That’s especially true in California, where Democrats hold both houses in the state legislature.
The tactics have been particularly successful in Southern California counties like San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside, and Imperial — “purple” regions that mostly have an even split between Democrats and Republicans, but also have pockets of deep red.
Church leaders like Hibbs are able to “capitalize on the fact that people don’t really pay attention to what’s going on city council and school boards,” in these outskirt areas, said Kristi Hirst, a former Chino educator and co-founder of Our Schools USA, an organization fighting back against this evangelical agenda.
Hibbs did not respond to emails for comment on this story.
Other churches in the Southern California region that also try to influence school board elections include Kevin O’Connor’s Ark Church in Redlands and 412 Church in Temecula. Tim Thompson runs both 412 and the Inland Empire Family PAC, which endorses far-right extremist candidates like Candy Olson. According to the organization Safe Redland Schools, Olson has attacked critical race theory and spread conspiracy theories about queer people.
Far-right “candidates are coming in with the church’s support and have pushed for policies, once in these (school) leadership roles, to ban Pride flags, limit discussions about gender identity, and require the ‘forced outing’ policies that we’ve been seeing flare up across the state,” Salinas said.
