Joseph Komrosky, Temecula Valley Unified School District’s embattled school board president, conceded to the June 4 recall special election at a recent school district meeting. Photo: Temecula Valley Unified School District
UPDATE: The Riverside County Registrar of Voters certified the official results on Thursday. Joseph Komrosky is recalled. He lost by 212 votes. Komrosky loses his seat immediately.
Rachel Cagwin Dennis writes about issues impacting the LGBTQ+ community in the Inland Empire.
Joseph Komrosky, Temecula Valley Unified School District’s embattled school board president, conceded defeat in the June 4 recall special election at a recent school district meeting.
“I wanted to thank my community for allowing me to represent your voices, and I look forward to serving my community again beginning in November,” Komrosky said during the June 11 meeting. (His comments begin at the 4:40:35 timestamp.)
As of the latest tally, the recall effort is ahead by 209 votes; 4,959 voted yes, and 4,750 voted no. In total, 45% of residents voted in the special recall election.
The election results are scheduled to be certified Thursday. The Riverside County Registrar of Voters must certify them by July 5, Elizabeth Florer, the registrar’s spokeswoman, said.
The board of trustees already has an open seat that it decided not to fill by appointment. If Komrosky is recalled, the board seems most likely to leave that seat open, too, and let voters decide.
That means for the November election, four of the five-member board seats will be open.
Komrosky was elected in November 2022 and sworn in the following month. His term was scheduled to expire in December 2026.
The close nature of the vote shows how divided the community is.
Komrosky’s time on the school board has been drenched in one anti-LGBTQ+ controversy after another.
Komrosky made national headlines in June 2023 when he called Harvey Milk a pedophile at a school board meeting where social studies textbooks were rejected due to Milk’s name being mentioned as the first openly gay politician elected in California.
Komrosky’s behavior caught the attention of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Rejecting the social studies materials, which had been approved by the state, violated the FAIR Education Act, which was passed in 2011. But after the state threatened the district with $1.5 million in fines, the board did an about face and approved the textbooks.
Komrosky paired up with Tim Thompson and the IE Family PAC, where Thompson is chief principal officer, early in his campaign. In 2022, the IE Family PAC endorsed candidates who ran on unfounded statements like critical race theory (CRT) being taught and sexual indoctrination happening in public schools.
Thompson is a right-wing extremist and Christian nationalist and pastor of 412 Church Temecula. He has spoken at a Stop the Steal rally and vowed to take back the public schools, restore parental rights, and stop the indoctrination of woke ideology.
Komrosky, along with two other Christian nationalists endorsed by IE Family PAC, Jen Wiersma and Danny Gonzales, were elected to the Temecula school board in 2022. As promised in their campaigns, they banned CRT at their first meeting in December 2022, sparking student walkouts at all district three high schools.
Murrieta Valley defies state order to rescind district’s outing policy
At this point, a group of Black moms with students at Great Oak High School began the process to recall Wiersma, who is also endorsed by the anti-LGBTQ+ group Moms for Liberty.
In March 2023, the conservative school board members hired Christopher Arend, a self-proclaimed CRT specialist who denies systemic racism and authored the CRT ban policy, to instruct teachers on the ban.
Additionally, a panel of “CRT experts,” whose main talent was opposing the academic field, were brought in to educate the community, all of which fanned the flames and drove a further wedge between residents.
An audit later confirmed that CRT is not taught in the Temecula Valley school district.
In June 2023, One Temecula Valley PAC, collaborating with the group of Black moms, started the recall process on Komrosky and Gonzales, who resigned in December 2023.
Later, the group’s focus shifted to putting all their energy into recalling Komrosky in an effort to break the school board’s conservative majority.
In August 2023, a coalition of students, parents, teachers, and the Temecula Valley Educators Association sued the district’s board of trustees for banning topics they disapproved. Earlier this year, a judge said the case could proceed.
That same month, as promised to those who voted for them, Komrosky, Wiersma, and Gonzales turned their attention to LGBTQ+ students. On Aug. 23, 2023, they passed Chino Valley’s Parental Notification Policy, also known as the “outing policy.” Attorney General Rob Bonta warned the district that its policy would have a detrimental effect on the well-being of LGBTQ+ students.
A second wave of student walkouts took place, and in October, the plaintiffs who sued the board of trustees expanded their lawsuit to challenge the outing policy.
A new flag policy was passed on Sept. 12, 2023, that banns Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ flags on school campuses. Temecula trended on social media, and Pride flags and other LGBTQ+ merchandise flooded the doorstep of a Great Oak trans student.
I like to say Thompson and the extreme Christian nationalists “woke” us up here in the valley. The community came together, worked hard, gathered the signatures necessary to have a recall election, and here we are.
Way to go Temecula.
Overall, I see an area vastly changing from extreme conservative roots to diversity and learning about and through the eyes of a variety of different people.
