Whose Values Does TVUSD Teach? The Board Owes an Answer.

Two people quoted the Bible at the August 18 meeting of the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education. One had every right to. The other was running the meeting.

Start with the one who had every right to. A parent at the public comment microphone read scripture aloud to make a point about district curriculum. That is protected speech in a public forum, and any board that tried to stop it would deserve the lawsuit it got. I would defend that parent's right to say it.

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But that parent is also a candidate for this board in November. So take them at their word. Someone asking this community for authority over curriculum told us, unprompted, how they reason about curriculum. That is not an accusation. It is a campaign disclosure, and voters in Trustee Area 4 should file it accordingly.

The second speaker is a different matter entirely, because the second speaker was the board president.

What the chair is for

The presiding officer of a school board is not one voice among five. He sets the flow of the agenda. He rules on points of order. He decides who is speaking out of turn, when comment is closed, and, in this district's recent memory, when a section of the audience is removed from the room.

From that chair, board president Joseph Komrosky read a bible passage into the record to argue against critical race theory in TVUSD schools.

Set aside for a moment what you think of critical race theory. I have my own view and it is not the point here.

Critical race theory is a body of legal and social scholarship. You can argue that it is wrong, that it is overstated, that it is poorly suited to a K-12 classroom, or that it is a solution in search of a problem. Those are arguments, they are made from evidence, and a board member who made them would be doing his job.

Scripture is not evidence about scholarship. It cannot disprove critical race theory any more than it can disprove the Krebs cycle. When the presiding officer of a public school board offers proof texts as the grounds for a curriculum judgment, he has told 26,000 families what the standard of proof is in this district. It is not research. It is not what teachers found in a pilot. It is doctrine, and doctrine is not reviewable by anyone who does not already accept it.

There is a second problem, and it should trouble this board's supporters as much as its critics.

There is no critical race theory in Temecula Valley Unified. That is not my assertion. When Mae M. v. Komrosky reached the Court of Appeal, the district's own appellate counsel conceded at oral argument that there was no evidence any of the concepts enumerated in the board's resolution had ever been taught in district schools. The court noted the concession, found the resolution unconstitutionally vague, and barred the district from enforcing it. In May 2025 this board voted to rescind or suspend the resolution and declined to seek a rehearing, ending its own defense.

The fight is over. The board lost it, then abandoned it, and the taxpayers of this district paid for both. On August 18 the presiding officer reopened it from the chair, on scriptural grounds, against a thing his own lawyers told a court was not happening.

A different substitution, same problem

Scripture was not the only thing standing in for evidence that night.

During discussion of instructional materials, Trustee Jennifer Wiersma said: "The issues that I see are not only identity politics but a skewed view of what it means to be a female... when it comes to the idea of femininity, I want a book that talks about traditional values as being okay."

To be fair to Wiersma, she did not propose that this district teach girls how to be women. She asked for materials that treat traditional values as legitimate. Framed as a request for balance, that is not an unreasonable thing for a parent to want.

The problem is where she was sitting when she said it.

Instructional materials in California are selected against state content standards, reviewed by committees of teachers, and piloted in real classrooms before adoption. That process exists precisely so that textbook selection is not a referendum on any one adult's values. When a trustee applies a femininity test to a book at the adoption stage, she has replaced that process with her own criterion, and it is a criterion thousands of families in this valley do not share and never will.

This is not a new concern in Temecula. The amended complaint in Mae M. v. Komrosky alleges that during the 2023 social studies adoption, after a committee of forty-seven teachers from every elementary site piloted the recommended materials, Wiersma offered a Christian homeschool curriculum as an alternative, one that did not meet California content standards. That is an allegation in a legal filing rather than a finding, and it should be read as such. But it describes the same move: a trustee's preferred values substituted for the review process the district built.

Roughly half the students in this district are girls. What a good life for a daughter looks like is a question their families answer, and families in Temecula answer it very differently. A household that teaches traditional roles is doing nothing wrong. Neither is the household next door that teaches something else entirely. The district's job is narrower and harder: guarantee every student access to every course, every opportunity, and an honest account of the historical and civic record, and leave the rest to the dinner table.

A trustee proposing that instructional materials be screened for their treatment of femininity has inverted that. Five elected officials would be deciding which answer gets the district's endorsement, on behalf of thousands of families who never agreed on the question.

My family has our answer: We believe women belong in every profession, at every level, and in every room they choose to enter. My daughter will hear from me that building a career, and building things the world has not seen yet, is worth striving for, and that raising a family is work both parents own. That belief is mine to teach and mine to argue for. It is not this board's to adopt, and I would say exactly the same to a board that adopted it in my favor.

One question for district counsel, in public, before any materials criterion of this kind advances. California Education Code section 220 and Title IX both prohibit sex discrimination in district programs. Where is the line between selecting materials and screening them for their treatment of one sex? Nobody has asked. Nobody has answered.

Sixty miles up the 15

Temecula does not have to guess where this leads.

In Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Chino Valley Unified School District, the Ninth Circuit held that school-sponsored prayer, Bible reading, and preaching at school board meetings violate the Establishment Clause. The exception that lets a city council open with an invocation does not extend to a school board, because school board meetings are full of students who are not there voluntarily and who do not stand on equal footing with the adults deciding their education. Chino Valley fought it and lost. The district paid more than $275,000 of public money in the other side's legal fees.

I am not claiming that what happened Tuesday is already that case. It is not, yet. Chino Valley involved an adopted policy and a standing practice, not remarks in debate.

I am pointing out that Chino Valley did not begin with a policy either. It began with board members who believed the chair was an appropriate place to share their faith, and it ended with a quarter-million-dollar bill for a district that had textbooks to buy. TVUSD already knows how this arithmetic works. It retained a religious liberty firm in August 2023 to defend the CRT resolution, litigated for nearly two years, lost on appeal, and rescinded the resolution rather than continue. Whatever that cost, it bought this district nothing. There is no version of the next round where the exposure is free.

What faith is owed, and where

None of this asks anyone to believe less.

Students in TVUSD can pray before a test, carry a Bible, say grace at lunch, and start a Christian club with the same access every other club gets. Federal law guarantees it, and I would defend that too. An English class can assign the Book of Job. A history class can and should teach the Reformation. The same Supreme Court decision that ended devotional Bible reading in public schools said plainly that teaching the Bible academically is permitted.

This valley also has strong Christian schools, where scripture is central to the mission, taught by people trained to teach it, to students whose families chose it deliberately. Their existence is precisely why nobody needs to turn a public district into a substitute for them.

The Establishment Clause was not written by people hostile to religion. It was written in large part by people who had watched established churches ruined by the state power they accepted. A faith that needs a school board podium has been made smaller, not larger.

Dillon Clark is a Temecula resident and TVUSD parent. He 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 served as president of a publicly elected advisory council in the City of Los Angeles and has held appointments to the D.C. Juvenile Justice Advisory Group, the D.C. State Title III Advisory Committee, and the Montgomery County, Maryland Landlord-Tenant Commission. He advises state and local government agencies, including school districts, on governance, operations, and finance. The views here are his own.