The three made a majority on our board. The first school board meeting where they had a majority creationism was brought up. The next meeting a fact free sex education program called Sex Respect was brought up. They turned down multi million dollar federal government grants that district employees had worked for years to obtain because they did not want those federal government strings attached.

Their own children did not attend our district schools. Their children were home taught or in little church schools.

Within three months a robust recall campaign was begun. They were recalled two years later but not before making national headlines and the front pages of the New York Times, LATimes, and SF Chronicle. We had overflow school board meetings with hundreds in attendence. Satellite cable trucks and reporters from CNN. It was a wild time.

After the Anti-public education group was defeated in the recall of 1994, I thought they were done. But I was wrong. They kept coming back every two years at each subsequent school board election campaign.

They have not since been able to get a majority on our board but have held two positions in almost every election.

They also have stopped new school bonds from being passed in our district. Because of California state law requiring two thirds majority for school bonds to pass. They have successfully used their minority status to get 40% or 37% or 34 % of the vote which caused the bonds to fail even thought the clear majority of voters wanted new schools..

When we did finally get a bond passed, the two ANTI minority members used another stupid California law that requires four out of five board members to approve land purchases to stop the purchase of land to build our needed third high school for another six years.

These folks are terrified of FACT based public education and the schools which provide FACT based science, history and sex education courses.

With their zealotry they were able to control the local San Diego County Republican Party. With that control of the County Republican organization, they were able to funnel money and donors from throughout the county to their anti public education school candidates in our local school board elections.

They ran training camps for potential candidates for local officies where the only participants allowed to attend were those who had a local pastor who would affirm in a phone call that they were members in good standing of his church. Of course that church had to be one of the “right” churches, not all churches had the correct religious views to send candidates.

I suspect some of their fundings has come from the Waltons of Walmart. A few of Sam Walton’s family members live in San Diego.

Tim LaHaye of Left Behind series used to have a church in San Diego from which he then founded the Christian Heritage College now called San Diego Christian College–the place Carrie Prejean attends. A college that is ACCREDITED! Yet does not teach evolution but according to their website does teach a class that they call Invertabrate (sic) Zooloogy. Christian Heritage spun off the Institute of Creation Research that for years was located locally in a city to the south of us, Santee.

Recently ICR has moved to Texas where it is demanding accredidation. The state of Texas amazingly has not rolled over and has pushed back.

Carrie Prejean is a graduate of Vista High School where both my sons attended and where the word evolution was mentioned on only ONE day during the entire 180 day school year of the required freshman Introduction to Biology.

I know why the High School teachers chose to de-emphasize the central organizing principle of biology, evolution, in their biology classes as I was a middle school science teacher in the district for years. The only way I could teach evolution was by showing my local site administrator, in charge of science at our school, that evolution and human evolution were in the California State Curriculum Guide (since then human evolution has been stripped out of the new State Standards in Science that replaced the State Curriculum Guide)

Nevertheless Parents called in regularly to complain to my site administrator and district administrator that I was teaching the religion of evolution. They began to see me as evil and looked for other kinds of complaints that they could make. Their children tried to disrupt my class during our two week unit on evolution using the ‘disruptive questions’ method taught by and advocated for by the Institute of Creation Research. Classroom problems multiplied each year even more during my next two week unit which was human evolution. So I know it is far easier for a teacher to ignore the “E” word or say ‘its just a theory” . Other paths lead to career problems. There were only three out of five of the middle school science teachers at my school who taught evolution.

The ANTI public education candidates who were religious zealots hid what they believe until elected and then they created chaos in our district. Even with the chaos they caused, a few folks still support them because they get the Republican County endorsement every year and we live in the most Republican part of a Republican County. (Given that you might think they would win every time especially as we have three Mega Churches in town but even among Republicans and Christians these folks are wearing out their welcome)

Thankfully their support is finally shrinking, we have only one left on our board. Last year he unsuccessfully tried to name a “Carrie Prejean Day” in our district to honor Carrie Prejean’s “accomplishments”. Now that he is alone on our board, he got no second and the matter was dropped but not until our local right wing newspaper had done several stories and editorials about Carrie Prejean Day.

I watched George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000 and recognized all the same components. Look what he did to the country.

These folks need to be stopped.

I feel like we in San Diego should apologize to the rest of the country. Much of the nuttiness that has swept the nation started here. On behalf of the rest of the County of San Diego, I do apologize to you all. We were not able to recognize them early enough and stop them.

I am still fighting the weekly battles and skirmishes with the folks we call the ANTIs in the on line comment sections following education articles in our local newspaper, the North County Times as blogger “con no more”

We call them ANTIs locally as a political decision because many who would never support their views would jump on their side if they were attacked as Republicans, or conservatives or Christians. And besides they are ANTI everything, ANTI public education, ANTI fact based science, ANTI fact based history, ANTI sex education, ANTI gay, ANTI government grants, ANTI school bonds, and ANTI immigrant.

The battles with the ANTIs go on locally. i have taken to calling the series of battles, the VUSD Wars, which seems appropriate given the strenghth of emotions. If you wish to read my responses to our local ANTIs attacks on our schools, you can read them by going to:
http://www.vistaschools.blogspot.com.