A local school board president in California has been inundated with threats that left-wing activists will dismember her, kill her children, and slaughter her pets. Her crime? Saying that teachers should not keep parents in the dark if their children begin to “identify” as transgender.
The new Chino Valley (California) Unified School District Board of Education policy states that school officials will notify parents in writing within three days if a child seeks to “identify” as a gender “other than the student’s biological sex,” use different pronouns, adopt a different name, or use the restroom or join a sports team of the opposite sex.
The board adopted the resolution Thursday by a 4-1 vote, with member Donald Bridge casting the lone dissenting vote.
“The next morning, our district got a phone call” from an anonymous caller threatening “to kill me, and they said that they were going to dismember” school board president Sonja Shaw, the official revealed on “Washington Watch With Tony Perkins” on Monday. Police alerted Shaw to the threat shortly before a previous interview on the show last Friday.
Then Shaw looked at her district email account, where she said she saw messages stating, “You’re going to die,” with a series of profane epithets. “Your children are going to die, and your animals are going to die.” For a “point of reference, they would name what kind of animals I had,” Shaw added.
“I also got notification that people who identify as being in the terrorist organization Antifa posted on their website, ‘We declare war on Sonja Shaw,’” Shaw told Perkins, adding that the group posted her address. “They said, ‘We know where you sleep,’” the same message an angry mob screamed outside the home of then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2018. “They said things like, ‘Use all force possible to stop her.’”
“I’m not going to lie. I was shaking,” Shaw confided on Monday. Police had beefed up patrols around her home to ensure security, she said.
While she had been “hesitant” to share the details of her ordeal, “God reminded me that these are the people that are after our children.”
“Sacramento has waged a war on parental rights, and a lot of it has to do with the perversion of our children,” Shaw told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, a former Georgia congressman, on Friday.
“We have to put up safeguards. That’s why I was put here,” Shaw told the school board meeting on Thursday.
After being alarmed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s top-down imposition of radical education policy as a parent, Shaw ran for school board, and “God opened the doors” to implement the new policy, she told Hice. When the Newsom administration learned of the impending policy, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond arrived at the district meeting Thursday night.
“It was a political stunt. He was trying to scare us,” assessed Shaw.
Thurmond requested a private meeting with Shaw prior to the meeting, but declined to follow through when he learned she would not withdraw the policy, Shaw has said. He instead addressed the board meeting, speaking as the first of 83 Californians to make their voices heard.
Video footage shows the attendees booed when Thurmond concluded, as Shaw asked everyone to “be respectful” toward the official. Thurmond exceeded his one-minute speaking slot, then returned to the podium demanding a “point of order,” although he is not a board member. Police eventually escorted him out of the building.
Thurmond later claimed he “stayed within the one-minute limit,” and tweeted, “When done speaking, the board president verbally attacked me an [sic] instructed police to remove me.”
State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, who authored a bill allowing out-of-state children who identify as transgender to flee to California and be injected with cross-sex hormones against their parents’ wishes, alleged, “The QAnon school board president cut him off.” But his former colleague, ex-state Sen. Melissa Melendez pointed out that “Thurmond militantly enforced the rules for speakers when he was in the legislature.”
The district’s newly enacted policy has won the support of parental rights advocates and education experts nationwide. “The school board in Chino Valley is making parental involvement and inclusion a priority. State level officials interested in a healthy school system should follow their lead,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.
But the policy drew instant backlash from the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, which announced its members are already “actively working on new approaches” to override the democratically enacted resolution. The liberal caucus added that parents who represented the near-unanimous consensus of the Chino Valley school board “will not stop us.”
“It appears some state legislators are scheming to make the newly passed CVUSD policy illegal with a future bill,” said Jonathan Zachreson, a member of the Roseville City School District school board and the founder of Reopen California Schools.
Parents in the district have expressed enthusiastic approval. “I think it’s crucial that we keep parents in this conversation. I think that the worst thing you can do to a child is to ostracize their parents from such an important conversation,” Amy Davlin, a parent in the district, told Newsmax on Tuesday morning.
“Groomers and pedophiles are the ones who attempt to gain the trust of children and encourage them to keep secrets” from their parents, said Davlin. A school district should “not encourage children to deceive and lie to their parents.”
More than two-thirds (68%) of Californians agree that parents should be notified if their minor children change their gender identity, according to a poll taken by Protect Kids California.
“I believe there is an all-out agenda against our children,” said Davlin, adding the new policy sends a message to activists who have weaponized education against parents: “You have crossed a red line. The red line is our children.”
Democrats have indicated a legal fight will ensue. California State Attorney General Rob Bonta threatened that the pro-parental rights policy “may violate California’s anti-discrimination law” in a letter to the Chino Valley school board seeking to sway Thursday’s vote. Disclosing a child’s transgender identification to his or her parents “is very likely to result in significant emotional, mental, and even physical harm,” Bonta asserted.
Parents and board members reject that talking point. “Why are you assuming that parents are dangerous?” asked Shaw.
“If you want a lower suicide rate, bring the parents into the conversation,” said Davlin. “We are the ones who love the kids the most. We are the ones who have their best interests at heart, not their teacher who is with them a few hours a day.”
As Newsom and Thurmond focus on social issues, California students fall further behind. California ranks 38th nationwide in K-12 education, according to U.S. News and World Report—behind such Republican strongholds as Florida (14), Virginia (13), Indiana (7), Utah (9), Nebraska (11), and South Dakota (24).
Education levels may improve if teachers focused on fundamentals rather than indoctrination, said Kilgannon. “We’re just trying to get the crazy out: To not have children taught wrong history, not have children taught that they could be born in the wrong body, not have children shown sexually explicit images,” she told Perkins on Monday.
Meanwhile, a potential 2024 Democratic presidential hopeful, Newsom, “plays the biggest part” in fueling the vitriol, hatred, and potential violence directed toward the Chino Valley school board, said Shaw. “But I’m glad that they’re exposing themselves,” she continued.
“My daily prayer is for those to be revealed, exposed, and removed that don’t have the best intentions and that have ill-intent for children,” Shaw told Perkins. Thanks to their voluble radicalism, “More people are starting to realize what we’re up against.”
“They’re literally driving a wedge between parent and child,” said Perkins on Monday. “This is evil. It’s just pure evil.”
A version of this article was oirignally published at WashingtonStand.com.
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