I'll Go First

Three of the five seats on the Temecula Valley Unified School District board are on the November 3 ballot: Area 2, held by Emil Barham; Area 3, held by Jennifer Wiersma; and Area 4, held by Joseph Komrosky. Filing closes Friday. In one election this valley can replace the majority of the board that governs 28,000 students.

The loudest promise from the candidates and organizations offering themselves as the alternative is "good governance."

I understand where that came from and I do not dismiss it. We have watched trustees threaten each other with litigation and trade accusations in open session. The district settled a federal civil rights suit over how the board president removed people from public comment, and that settlement remains under court enforcement into 2027. An organizational meeting last December collapsed without seating a clerk. It has been ugly and it has been expensive.

But good governance does not fix this. It relocates the fight.

Think about what a board elected on process actually argues about. It argues about process. Whether a motion was properly seconded. Whether the president recognized a speaker in order. Whether an item was noticed correctly, whether an email among three trustees was a serial meeting, whether the bylaws let a trustee agendize something without the president's blessing.

That December meeting is the example. Nobody in that room was short on rules. The rules were the terrain. The fight was procedural start to finish and it ended with nothing accomplished.

Robert's Rules and board bylaws are not neutral referees. They are weapons, and they are weapons that require a lawyer to interpret. If the complaint about this board is that it spent too much on attorneys arguing with itself, the answer cannot be a board that promises to argue with itself more carefully. Meanwhile the actual disagreement in this valley is not procedural at all. It is about what our children should learn and who decides. No amount of parliamentary discipline closes that. It just gives both sides a new vocabulary for the same fight.

So let me do what I am asking candidates to do. Here is what I want from this board, in plain language.

Repeal the anti-CRT resolution. It is vague by design, which is what makes it effective. Teachers cannot tell what it forbids, so they steer around anything close to it, and the chilling effect does the work the text cannot. It has not raised a single student's reading score. It has generated legal exposure and national coverage. Repeal it and say why.

Adopt the state-approved materials. I think California's instructional materials process is good. It runs on expert review, public comment, and adoption cycles that outlast any three trustees. When this board rejected the state-aligned social studies curriculum in May 2023 and forced the state to intervene, it substituted the judgment of three people for that process. I want trustees who will adopt what the state approves, including the parts that make some parents uncomfortable, and who will defend that choice at the microphone instead of hiding behind a procedural objection.

Put books back with librarians. Selection and reconsideration belong to credentialed staff working a written review process, with a real appeal for parents who object. It does not belong to trustees pulling titles from a dais.

Pay our teachers, and fund it honestly. We are not competing for teachers against some abstraction. We are competing against the districts ten minutes up the 15, and right now we are losing that competition on purpose, because someone decided the money was better spent elsewhere. Make a real offer. Fund it from the central office and the legal budget before anyone touches a classroom. Tell us the number and tell us what you are cutting. Do not hand teachers a one-time bonus and call it a raise, and do not put an ongoing raise on one-time money and leave the next board holding a qualified certification. Yes, that is hard. Budgeting is hard. It is the job. If you do not want that responsibility, do not run for the office.

Stop legislating about LGBTQ students. Forced notification policies do not protect children. They put the most vulnerable kids in this district at risk in their own homes, and they have generated litigation everywhere they have been tried.

Own the numbers. Not a slogan about excellence. Numbers, with your name on them. The gap in reading and math between our highest performing students and our lowest. Chronic absenteeism, broken out for low income students and students with disabilities, because the district average hides the kids who are actually missing school. Outcomes for our special education students and our English learners. A-G completion and graduation for the students furthest behind, not the district-wide figure the board likes to quote.

You do not have to know those numbers today. You have to commit to publishing them, setting a growth target for each one, reporting against that target in open session every year, and standing for reelection on whether you hit it. I am not asking anyone to promise a result. I am asking you to name the target and accept the verdict.

A trustee who never names a target can never miss one. That is the whole appeal.

You may disagree with every word of that. Fine. That is the point. You now know exactly what I believe and exactly how to argue with me.

That is what "good governance" is designed to prevent. In a valley where the 2022 slate won outright, a candidate who promises only to restore order can take an endorsement from the reform side and still collect a vote from someone who liked the anti-CRT resolution and just wants meetings to end before midnight. It is smart campaigning. It is a terrible deal for voters, because there is no way to be held to it. If our numbers are flat in 2030, the answer will be that at least the meetings ran on time.

And I will say this to the people who are quietly counting on those candidates to vote my way once they are seated. A trustee elected on nothing owes you nothing. If you want the anti-CRT resolution repealed, elect someone who campaigned on repealing it. Otherwise you will get four years of polite three-to-two votes to leave it exactly where it is. Decorum is not a repeal.

I would rather lose to someone who tells this community what they believe than win with someone who told us nothing. At least then we would be having the real argument, in public, with names on it, and we could settle it at the ballot box like adults.

I have gone first. Areas 2, 3, and 4: your turn, before Friday, in writing.

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Dillon Clark is an experienced public servant who has worked as a social worker in a juvenile justice agency, an educator and district program administrator in a major urban school system, and a co-founder and executive of multiple nonprofit public charter schools. He previously served as president of a publicly elected advisory council in the City of Los Angeles and has held formal appointments to several boards and commissions, including the D.C. Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, the DC State Title III Advisory Committee, and the Montgomery County, Maryland Landlord-Tenant Commission. He currently serves as a subject-matter expert on governance, operations, administration, and finance for state and local government agencies, including school districts nationwide.