High schoolers found out through Twitter that their principals were forced out. During last week’s Board of Trustees Meeting, Esperanza High School students announced a walkout for Wednesday, March 20^th, 2024, to reject the politically motivated release of Placentia Yorba Linda Unified School District (PYLUSD) employees as ordered by Superintendent Alex Cherniss and HR Director Issaic Gates. Cherniss, the district’s third superintendent in three years, has implemented controversial “parental rights” actions.

Parents have been calling out the nonsense since the school board was overtaken by a maga conspiracy-driven majority in 2020. Conscience parents denounced the blocking of book approvals, the discontinuation of a contractor because of its gay presenter, and the passage of the Resolution to Ban CRT in 2022. Here is a newsletter chronicling the attacks on public education in PYLUSD:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gyUgYGXCsMQQf64X8nas-BUKSSd-0XuT?usp=drive_link

Students, retired teachers, and community members have spoken up since PYLUSD employees have been silenced. The morale within the district’s administrative office is low since about a third of those administrators left the hostile and retaliatory workplace. The Student Walkout is to support good onsite leaders. Most parents support the right to protest the governing board of their schools. Esperanza High School students and potentially other high schools plan to walk out for under an hour and return to class. Classmates and the public must continue to call out HR Director Gates’s unfair and sketchy tactics at the direction of Superintendent Alex Cherniss and Board President Leandra Blades to push out good onsite leaders at various campuses.

One day before the March 2024 Board Meeting, Trustee Leandra Blades put out a video rant breaking Brown Act rules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT82HlDRLBM

We need to repair our school board and district leadership so it works for all of us. Four of the five current board members have ideologies of putting religion in the curriculum, limiting access to books and other educational materials, and boldly targeting the teacher’s union on their social media platforms.

Parents and homeowners must keep working as watchdogs on the board majority and witness how funds are allocated, reject their criticism of playground contracts (conflict resolution), denounce their untrained book critiques and claims that systemic racism does not exist, and demand transparency from the new Superintendent. It is wonderful to see how students unite to support good onsite leaders, their principals, and assistant principals by walking out on March 20th. They use pylusd.walkout on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/C4jYLa6P-ep/

Esperanza High School is located at 1830 N. Kellogg Drive, Anaheim 92807 (north of the 91 freeway, south of Yorba Linda)