Teacher union swindle in Orange Unified serves as a lesson for all of California

They may not care much about education, but give teacher union leaders in the city of Orange, California, credit for speed and political ingenuity.

Shortly after a successful March recall campaign in which leaders of the Orange Unified Education Association replaced two conservatives with two union-backed trustees, the newly configured board promptly awarded teachers a 10 percent pay hike.

That pay hike has blown a hole in Orange Unified’s finances, documents obtained by California Policy Center reveal.

In a September 13 memo to district officials, assistant superintendent Sulema Holguin reported that the post-recall pay increase has driven the district toward financial collapse.

“It appears that the adopted budget in June did not fully account for the ongoing costs of the raises,” Holguin wrote.

As a result, Holguin said, the district had taken the extraordinary step of tapping reserves.

“Updating the budget projections to reflect the cost of the raises appears to require that some of the reserves will need to be used to meet our obligations,” she wrote in the same memo. “In other words, it appears that we are deficit spending – spending more money than we are receiving.”

Holguin noted that deficit spending “is very concerning as reserves are one-time funds and should never be used for ongoing expenditures (such as raises).”

Perhaps heeding Holguin’s dire forecast, her boss, district superintendent Ernest Gonzalez, abruptly resigned his post on November 15. The board of trustees is searching for a replacement.

Union leaders built their March recall campaign around a single charge: “extremists” had taken over the board and were dismantling public education. As evidence, they seized on the board’s adoption of a “parent-notification” policy that would require parent authorization before teachers and other school employees engage in gender transitioning children in the district’s K-12 schools.

The teacher union campaign included letters to the editors of local newspapers, teams of doorknockers, phone banking and yard signs. Most significantly, union activists packed school board meetings, shouting down conservative trustees and parents – and then blamed the board for the chaos.

Behind the scenes, district documents show, the real purpose of the recall was to replace conservative board members with union-friendly trustees who would approve the salary hike.

“Our conservative majority was always trying to settle with their union reps on raises,” said Madison Miner, a trustee recalled in the March vote. Miner and others say the union was demanding a 10 percent pay hike. A majority of the board was persuaded by the district’s financial staff’s finding “that 6 percent was the highest we could go without putting the district in fiscal distress. The union reps wouldn’t even negotiate.”

Miner says it became clear by December 2023 that those union reps were misrepresenting the district’s finances to their fellow teachers.

“They were sending out information and talking to their union members, stating that the conservative [board] majority was not willing to give them any raise at all,” Miner says.

Following the recall, when she learned that the newly configured board had approved a nearly 10 percent raise, “it threw up red flags immediately for me because I knew that even 6 percent would push us over the edge.”

California Policy Center financial analysts say the pay hikes are a disaster in a district with declining enrollment. Without massive spending cuts, teacher layoffs, school closures, and a tax hike, the district will run through its renovation reserve in about two years.

Video obtained by California Policy Center shows that the recall campaign was coordinated with the union’s state parent organization, the California Teacher Association. Speaking to state union leaders on a video call nearly a year before the March recall, OUEA executive director Roger Urroz Jr. said he had “already been in contact with the higher-ups at CTA. The officers are aware of what’s going on in Orange. They are very concerned.”

In the same conversation, Urroz makes it clear that state union leaders saw the Orange school board takeover as a kind of test for future efforts all over California. “They’re seeing it as ‘Orange is the pilot,’ if you will: if they can succeed here in Orange then they know they can go to other districts and do the same thing.”

As much as Orruz’s teacher union attempted to camouflage the recall as a grassroots effort, it’s clear that union money was paramount – including money from CTA’s political action committee, Association for Better Citizenship.

“We are already working on trying to get ABC money through CTA to come to OUEA and then we will turn around if you will provide that to the recall group so we’re working on that CTA management or leadership is aware they are concerned and they are working with me to bring in resources and support.”

Even as the union alleged that “outside money” had elected “extremists,” CTA itself confirmed that it directed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the district from union locals all over the state. In a June proclamation, CTA characterized the recall as a triumph of community activism – while more quietly underscoring the critical role of other teacher union locals in bankrolling the campaigns of the union-friendly candidates who replaced Miner and Rick Ledesma.

The Orange Unified union “received donations from other local CTA chapters to stop the extremist takeover of schools, including Westminster, Anaheim, Saddleback, Tustin, La Habra, Buena Park and Capistrano . . . they and coalition volunteers helped gather signatures, canvass, write postcards and make phone calls,” CTA bragged. “The recall, on the 2024 March Primary Election ballot, was successful. As a result, OUEA members are more politically aware and active than ever before, and OUEA recently joined the Orange County Labor Federation.”

Politically aware and active, indeed. But hardly financially literate. Following the successful recall, union supporters cheered the wisdom of the public. But with the district’s financial dashboard now flashing red, their comments in the immediate aftermath of the recall now sound ironic.

“We look forward to a time where school board meetings can be boring again, with a board that is focused on the financial health of our district,” pro-union activist Darshan Smaaladen told the gullible Voice of OC. The campaign proved that Orange voters “are committed to ensuring that we have trustees in the future that will be working in the best interest of all students. It’s something we’ve never had before.”

Count on the union-backed board of trustees to hire a new superintendent who shares the board’s loyalty to the teacher union. They will likely agree that cutting education programs is the best course of action, followed quickly by another round of political campaigns to raise taxes.

In that next campaign, teacher union leaders – the very people who have undermined Orange public schools – will proclaim that only they can save it. Following the familiar union playbook, they will assert that district schools are unsafe – crumbling, even – that students are imperiled, and that only higher taxes can save them. Resuscitating their March recall playbook, they will charge opponents of the tax hike with “extremism.”

In the meantime, Orange Unified teachers can be grateful to their union for one thing: Their pay hikes are guaranteed by the contract negotiated after the recall. Only Orange Unified’s kids – and their parents and taxpayers – will suffer.

This article originally appeared in the OC Register.

Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast.