Why are so many Bay Area school board recall efforts fizzling during the pandemic?

Following a year of recall fever that thrust California into the national spotlight with attempts to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom and other elected leaders, a similar trend is sweeping school boards across the state.

Though most attempts fizzled at a much higher rate than before the pandemic, state lawmakers now want to make it tougher to initiate recalls, which currently require just 10 signatures to start the ball rolling.

Assemblymember Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park, likens the low threshold to an “angry person going to the bar with his buddies and passing” around a form for them to sign.

In Silicon Valley, parents at Cupertino Union School District — which spans parts of Cupertino, Los Altos, San Jose, Santa Clara, Saratoga and Sunnyvale — had been collecting signatures since last fall to recall board members Lori Cunningham, Sylvia Leong and Phyllis Vogel. Cunningham was the target of a previous recall attempt that never made it to the ballot in 2021.

Proponents of the recall were incensed with the board’s decision to close Regnart and Meyerholz elementary schools because of declining student enrollment and to delay the return to in-person learning.

But in early April, the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters alerted recall organizers that they missed the filing deadline to turn in petitions with at least 11,542 verified signatures.

Such attempts played out at school boards across the country, according to Joshua Spivak, a recall expert and senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College.

“In 2021, there was this explosion of recalls almost all related to COVID masking policies and other policies,” he said. “But what was interesting was, not only very few got to the ballot, almost none succeeded.”

Spivak has been tracking recall elections at school districts and all levels of government since 2011. Last year, he counted a total of 609 recall attempts, of which only 66 made it to the ballot. And in 40 of those the elected officials survived.

In normal years before the pandemic, on the other hand, Spivak estimated that about 60% of recalls resulted in removal and 6% ended with the officials resigning.

Among the pandemic-related recall attempts that fizzled in the Bay Area last year was one launched by parents at Mount Diablo Unified. They wanted to recall the entire five-person board for not ordering teachers back to in-person classes in the winter of 2020.

And earlier this month, an effort to recall Antioch Unified school board trustee Ellie Householder also petered out after proponents alleged she “committed Brown Act violations by blocking/deleting comments on social media (eliminating equal access),” and violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act “by publicly posting an unauthorized video of students without permission and has committed numerous Robert’s Rules of Order violations during meetings.”

As decisions involving in-person learning, masks and vaccinations hung in the balance, school board meetings have become increasingly tense with some trustees being “accosted, verbally abused, physically assaulted and subjected to death threats against themselves and their family members,” according to the California School Boards Association.

So the nonprofit, which represents nearly 1,000 education institutions across the state, called on Newsom last fall to seek protection for district officials and board members.

Cupertino Union’s Cunningham knows the fear. She said she and her family have been harassed and received death threats throughout the recall process. Last week, she was alerted that organizers were attempting to revive the recall effort even though her term ends in December. Recall organizers declined to comment about their plans.

“I think that whole process, both of the recalls frankly, have really been about if you don’t agree with someone they’re not just wrong, they’re evil,” Cunningham said. “I really feel like it’s been frustrating to be cast in a light that implies that I don’t care about kids or I have ulterior motives when it couldn’t be further from the truth.”

While many recent school board recall attempts centered around the pandemic, Spivak said the other bucket of attempts included recalls over “broadly critical race theory,” where parents took aim at progressive initiatives. And, a few have succeeded.

In February, the San Francisco Unified School District made national headlines when three school board members – Alison Collins, Faauuga Moliga and Gabriela Lopez – were recalled.

The board members came under attack in early 2021 when, instead of dealing with students’ struggles in distance learning, they focused on a proposal to rename some of the district’s schools named after historical figures such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to be more inclusive.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed reflected the sentiment of many parents when she said in a January 2021 statement she couldn’t understand why the board was “advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.”

With the rise in recall attempts in California, state legislators like Berman are looking to reform the process.

Assembly Bill 2584, which Berman introduced in February with Assemblymembers Mike Gipson, D-Carson, and Steve Bennett, D-Ventura, would make changes to the recall process, including increasing the number of signatures needed to initiate the process, although that number has not yet been included in the bill. It also would establish a standard for accuracy in stating why an elected official should be recalled.