SoCal School Board Races to Watch in November 2024
Glendale holds elections during the California Primary, but many other Districts align their elections with the General Election.
Parents and community members who care about public education should be paying close attention to local races, which are often decided by less than 10,000 voters. Winners often win by margins of 500 votes or less.
Many voters “undervote” - meaning they skip the local races. In Chino Valley Unified, which is now run by a trio of anti-LGBTQ Christian Nationalists, the undervote in 2022 was enough to decide the race for head extremist Sonja Shaw.
The good news is that in Chino Valley, Temecula, Orange, and Burbank, we have plenty of qualified candidates throwing their hat in the ring to make school board meetings boring again. These candidates will focus on actually running school districts, rather than attempting to leverage viral public comment fights into Fox News appearances (as Shaw has done). Please share this resource with friends and family who may be voting in these key races.
Strong public schools create strong communities for everyone who lives there, not just parents and children.
BURBANK UNIFIED
BUSD is moving to Trustee Areas from at-large in November 2024.
There are three incumbent seats to defend:
Emily Weisberg, Steve Ferguson, and Armand Aghakhanian
They are facing opposition from at least one candidate backed by the LOKA (Leave Our Kids Alone) hate group. Her name is Annie Markarian, and she's running in Armand's trustee area against him.
You can see the extremists who are endorsing Markarian on their Instagram feed. The language is the exact same playbook we saw in Glendale for our last election: stoking fear and hatred against elected officials who support basic human rights for all students. Markarian has apparently made a splash at BUSD board meetings, where her major issue was yelling at the Burbank school board about even studying the idea of workforce housing for teachers.
CHINO VALLEY UNIFIED
Chino Valley was taken over by an infusion of cash from megachurch Christian Nationalist Jack Hibbs in 2022. (There are no contribution limits on local races in Chino). The trio of Sonja Shaw, Andrew Cruz, and James Na escalated attacks on LGBTQ+ students, parents, and teachers with their newly-established majority.
After ejecting State Supt. of Public Education Tony Thurmond out of a meeting during public comment, Shaw continued to double down on violations of federal and state laws protecting student privacy via forced outing policies. The legal fees piling up against CVUSD have now drained nearly $1 million from the general fund. Teacher vacancies are up, school violence is up, and student well-being is suffering.
Fortunately, Bobby Omari, Beau McFarland, and Eric Shamp have stepped up to run in the three races on the November ballot.
