CVUSD Snapshot
Conejo Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) is located in Thousand Oaks, CA. CVUSD more recently has been host to Gays Against Groomers (GAG), proud boys, and local conservative wingnuts at their bi-weekly school board meetings as a result of the culture war. These extremists showed up in 2022 in opposition to transgender youth being affirmed by the district in alliance with the California Healthy Youth Act (CHYA), which requires comprehensive sexual education taught in public schools in California. Much to their disdain, that includes instruction on/for LGBTQ+ individuals.
There is a historical pattern that local conservatives show up at CVUSD board meetings about 9 months before each election cycle hoping to get their candidates on the school board. 2022 was no different but this time they brought individuals from outside the district seeking to pitch their grifts, bigotry, and hatred. While this hasn’t proved successful for them, it has not stopped them from embarrassing themselves and in the process losing more votes by showing up for three minutes or less of public speaking at the lectern.
Some say before the great culture war began, there was the test lab of the Conejo Valley…
Where It All Began
There have been several extremist backed school board candidates who have sought out the coveted and prestigious Conejo Valley Unified School District (CVUSD) school board in Thousand Oaks over the past decade. Long before the menagerie of conservatives and extremist puppets showed up, there was former trustee Mike Dunn. Dunn sat on the board for a decade until he was finally ousted by a team of employees of a local marketing/PR firm he threatened because an employee of theirs showed up to a board meeting and called out Dunn’s draconian opinion of literature that was on the state’s approved reading list. Nobody can organize voters like a scorned PR firm!
Dunn was a Mussolini look alike with an enormous America flag upon the wall of the board room where he would center himself in front of it for the cameras. When he wasn’t boot licking his hero Ronald Reagan, who Dunn insisted deserved to be recognized on the school calendar with his own day, Dunn was keen to proudly declare at the dais in violation of the US Constitution that he was denying materials or policies because they did not “comply with the teachings of the Catholic Church.” Unsurprisingly and related, Dunn was well known in hushed parental circles for harassing and threatening parents and community members with whom he disagreed. After all, dress like a dictator, might as well…
The Rise and Rapid Fall Of Sandy Everett
The CVUSD school board has five elected seats. The 2016 election was supposed to be Hillary and happier times according to two million popular votes. As the state of Georgia will prove in the coming months, there were forces of deception lurking around wherever you looked, even in the Conejo Valley.
It was then no surprise when Sandee Everett showed up in 2016 seeking one of the at-large open seats. (The district has now moved to by area voting to ensure marginalized communities are more likely to have elected officials who look like them and represent their values and interests.) Leading up to the election, Everett was furiously involved in the PFAs at her kids’ schools trying to convince other parents she was a decent human being. Sadly, they believed her remedial community theater level acting skills, or maybe they just didn’t care at that time.
Everett is rumored to already have had a particular history, though. In February of 2015, one of the high schools in the district ran a Valentine’s Day article on sex in their newspaper magazine. The clincher was that the Panther Prowler printed that edition with a banana wrapped in a condom for the front page. The sexless Kens and Barbies in the shadows of porn capital of the world, the famous “Valley,” went ballistic.
It’s rumored that Everett and her husband marched in the front doors of Newbury Park High School shortly after and started rounding up student journalists in retaliation for their seemingly vanilla sex lives and went off on them. While we make no claims here this rumor is true, a court case that was filed about five years later, did allege in the filing that the Everetts harassed the journalism advisor behind the news magazine in the days, weeks and months that followed.
After Everett left the dais, voters would come to learn that her families past included a scandalous incident which involved her then minor brother and his football team peers egregiously hazing another student while he was in high school. That case would go all the way to the Utah state court, where the aggrieved student was granted a modicum relief in a case that involved Everett’s brother being identified as one of key culprits in the incident. Everett’s father was quoted in a Utah newspaper with seemingly no remorse saying that the players’ actions were simply, “boys will be boys.”
Despite being warned, the then superintendent who was less than a year into her tenure, is rumored to have helped elect Everett. Although Everett was a one term Mormon mommy of five with an agenda and her ringlets in a knot, the clueless superintendent began recommending her for more involvement in CVUSD. Everett wasted no time trying to push through an unpopular literature censorship policy, a fact that caused her voters much regret. Her plan was to take the state’s approved literature list and place asterisks next to literature she and her compatriots deemed immoral, questionable, and “adult themed.”
The Crazies Take The Stage
More Conejo Valley mommies with a hatred of public schools or conservative deemed “immorality” were propelled to run for the board or seek nomination of vacated seats after this time period. They included cavalcade of characters, like Patti Jones, a Mormon disaster who cried unicorn tears at the dais during public comments because abortion is taught as part of comprehensive sexual education; required by the state. Another candidate was a gadfly who lost a custody case in court and oddly therefore has seemingly made it her personal vendetta to punish CVUSD in menial ways like harassing attendees at middle school jazz band concerts. Still another failed candidate, Karen Meyer, proudly shared photographs of her and her husband with assault weapons, in a community that experienced a mass shooting. When Meyer was called out on it she proclaimed the photo was taken in Vegas and the guns were merely rented. All of the conservative candidates championed re-opening schools during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and are idea purveyors of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-public education rhetoric. Stephon would say, “the CVUSD board races have everything!
The Christofascist Connection
Rob McCoy, pastor of Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Newbury Park which does business under the name Godspeak, and several other Christian based organizations and individuals, were behind the campaigns of some horrific candidates by providing financial backing, campaign assistance, and more. McCoy who was freshly campaigning to potentially murder his congregants by opening his church doors during California’s Covid safer at home mandate, turned his attention to the public schools that he had already been swinging for following the graduation of his last child within the district.
As an aside, media attention whore McCoy is believed to have only spoken once at a CVUSD board meeting, despite his children being alumni of the district. McCoy spoke at that meeting in support of a student who assaulted another student. Because apparently students can assault other kids if they feel they deserve it? It would later be revealed years later that the student was the cousin of a woman who would run (and lose) in 2022 on what seemed to be a platform of unconstitutionally putting Christ in public schools.
The McCoy backed candidates were more evangelical than Mike Dunn. They were Fox News watching, white privileged, and aligned with the Council for National Policy, which McCoy sits on. Their goal was to confuse the public by spreading pernicious lies and falsehoods about CVUSD and public schools. I’m doing so, they believed voters would fall for it. Voters proved them wrong. So very very wrong.
For example, 2018 failed candidate, Amy Chen was once listed as CEO of a local faux newspaper that is distributed with an agenda of discrediting and smearing CVUSD. The Conejo Guardian, which is distributed throughout the Conejo Valley once a month, also has ties to McCoy. McCoy has admitted on video to being directly involved with the paper’s production and distribution referring to himself as “we” when speaking about the rag.. (More information on The Conejo Guardian can be found here.)
Three new seemingly more controlled by their overlords and McCoy decorated candidates joined the November 2022 board race. The results of that election cycle was another comedy of errors for local extremists. The new crop of anti education Fascist like candidates brought a full blown circus with them. From being required by the county election office to update financial documents that they seemingly submitted with errors, spending double and triple what other candidates in the past had spent (only to lose by near similar margins), to one candidate’s sign being lit on fire. The people of CVUSD were having none of it.
During that election cycle, CVUSD became ground zero for bigots after a local father who had rarely been seen before by other parents was unhappy with the California Healthy Youth Act and the local control plan that affirms and protects transgender youth in their classrooms and promotes inclusivity. When his daughter’s class was shown a video of a book meant to prepare classmates for the return of a socially transitioning transgender student, the father (Hate Dad) complained to CVUSD leadership.
The Exploitation of Hate Dad
The Conejo Guardian, the conservative rag mentioned above, was suspended by the Attorney General’s office because they couldn’t produce proper paperwork to support their feigned business objectives or non profit status. But not before McCoy’s pals and the newspaper were quick to exploit Hate Dad’s narrative. The Guardian, which was prepared and folded inside McCoy’s church in violation of their non profit status one might argue, featured a story targeting the teacher who showed the video, and district leadership. After that issue dropped on local driveways, the elementary school where Hate Dad’s daughter attended was defaced with graffiti that read “pervs wrk here”.
Seems Hate Dad’s ‘compelled to action’ culprit can’t spell. Long after the spray paint was investigated by local police, many still suspect the obvious culprit(s). But that spelling mistake on a school edifice? It’s an irony that is not lost on any of us here at SCEW.
Chaos Erupts
This incident provoked a strong response from the community, and the CVUSD June 2022 School Board meeting erupted into chaos when pro LGBTQ+ supporters and actual parents in the district rallied at the entrance opposite McCoy’s associates from Godspeak Calvary, who would later be referred to as “Rob Mob.” This air of conflict continued throughout the year as the community ramped up for elections, and school board races began. The Rob Mob and their hate slate candidates attended board meetings often, grievances screaming from the public dias to a community that vehemently disagrees with them.
As the November ’22 election drew near that fall, instigators began to invite community outsiders to speak at board meetings where minor students were often present. Members from Gays Against Groomers (GAG), a far-right anti-LGBTQ+ organization, made two appearances and advertised CVUSD meetings on social media in the hopes of drawing a crowd. GAG members did not have children in the district, and were invited purely for the media attention by Hate Dad and RobMob. One particular member of GAG, Mario Estrada, has ties to the Proud Boys, a far-right neo-fascist group that promotes political violence.
GAG appearances drew media attention and resulted in local and eventually national news coverage of the events happening at CVUSD meetings. Clearly the manufactured outrage at CVUSD board meetings and the circus it brought with it reached ears outside of the district, and national attention created by bad actors who were district outsiders had repercussions.
Bring a Clown, Expect a Circus
On Oct. 13, 2022 a Goleta resident left two voicemail messages threatening to murder the current superintendent. Randall Earl Graham, a 45 year old man with no known ties to CVUSD, can be heard in the second message saying “If you guys don’t stop grooming children, we’re going to put a bullet through every single one of you, you demented f***ing people. Here’s a warning. It’s not a threat. It’s a fact. Somebody is going to f***ing shoot you.” Graham would later plead guilty to a Felony charge on April 4th, 2023, a crime carries up to a 3 year sentence.
Then CVUSD Board President Lauren Gill commented for the local free newspaper VC Reporter on the incident with an explanation for the criminal threats the district had received. She wasted no time citing Mcoy’s influence on the Conejo Valley, and his position as co-chair of TPUSA Faith. TPUSA added CVUSD to a “school board watchlist” of “radical” districts on their website, and she further explains that “Pastor Rob McCoy was a part of the American Renewal Project that was funded and founded by David Lane with an emphasis on getting reactionary evangelical folks into public office where they could influence public policy.”
The radical evangelicals in the CVUSD have certainly made their mark, and we at SCEW know the hateful and extremist rhetoric they espouse will end but, for the safety of the school board members and their families, the community continues to keep a watchful and protective eye. Fascists don’t just fade away. They burn slowly into the wee hours of the morning.
The Future, We’re Ready For It!
The hate slate backed candidates were easily defeated in the 2022 election in a landslide victory for the multicultural and LGBTQ+ Students in the Conejo Valley. California works to ensure safe and inclusive learning environments and the CVUSD board works to uphold that function. There is little dispute that McCoy and his buddies sought to influence and obstruct CVUSD business with typical right-wing talking points such such as anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, suppression of sexual health education, and the dismantling of DEI and socio-emotional learning programs children of CVUSD and the community at large depend on.
The next election cycle is coming up in 2024. Two school board seats are up for re-election. For now the board has been protected from extremists and their agendas by way of a very vigilant and involved community, but SCEW will keep tabs on this district to keep you informed. CVUSD must remain free of bad actors and extremist rodeo clowns.