Public schools are in the business of offering education, not enforcing it at gunpoint. Too often, districts treat parental opt-outs like a threat to the system, when in reality they’re just a reflection of choice.
If parents want to pull their kids out of health class, history lessons, literature, locker rooms, or extracurriculars, let them. It’s not the district’s role to force feed knowledge to unwilling families.
When ideologues seize local school boards, they don’t just inflame meetings. They run up bills. A first-of-its-kind study from UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access tallied the national price tag of these culture-war fights—legal fees, investigations, security, PR, and staff time—and found U.S. districts spent about $3.2 billion in 2023–24 responding to politically manufactured conflict. That’s money not spent on teachers, tutoring, arts, buses, or repairs.
When Murrieta Valley School District Board President Nick Pardue cited the so-called “45 Communist Goals” as “history” during Tuesday night's MVUSD school board meeting, he wasn’t just making a casual error — he was peddling a decades-old piece of political fiction as fact.
This isn’t a matter of differing interpretations; it’s a matter of documented truth versus ideological invention.
And why did he tell this fable to Murrietans? To justify voting against $800,000 in funding for mental health programs for the school district.
Public schools are in the business of offering education, not enforcing it at gunpoint. Too often, districts treat parental opt-outs like a threat to the system, when in reality they’re just a reflection of choice.
If parents want to pull their kids out of health class, history lessons, literature, locker rooms, or extracurriculars, let them. It’s not the district’s role to force feed knowledge to unwilling families.
When ideologues seize local school boards, they don’t just inflame meetings. They run up bills. A first-of-its-kind study from UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access tallied the national price tag of these culture-war fights—legal fees, investigations, security, PR, and staff time—and found U.S. districts spent about $3.2 billion in 2023–24 responding to politically manufactured conflict. That’s money not spent on teachers, tutoring, arts, buses, or repairs.
When Murrieta Valley School District Board President Nick Pardue cited the so-called “45 Communist Goals” as “history” during Tuesday night's MVUSD school board meeting, he wasn’t just making a casual error — he was peddling a decades-old piece of political fiction as fact.
This isn’t a matter of differing interpretations; it’s a matter of documented truth versus ideological invention.
And why did he tell this fable to Murrietans? To justify voting against $800,000 in funding for mental health programs for the school district.