The Brief

The conservative Placentia-Yorba Linda School District board majority voted Tuesday to make it more difficult for the incoming, post-election board, to oust district leaders.

Voters flipped the board on Nov. 5. Now, the outgoing majority wants to lock in some of its controversial changes.

It’s a scenario that’s likely playing out across the country in the lame duck weeks after Election Day. But the battles have become heightened in our polarized political environment, and especially at school boards, where hot-button issues have captured headlines.

Here's the backstory

The district in north Orange County has been a battleground for culture wars and budget debates in recent years. The school board was one of the first in the state to ban the teaching of critical race theory, in 2022.

They passed a parental notification policy last year, though the policy excludes any explicit mention of “gender identity.”

The deeply divided factions on the five-member board — along with their public supporters — have also fought over top-level hirings and firings, and the budgeting for a charter school and an elite sports institute, which opened this fall.

In November, voters returned one conservative candidate to the board and rejected another in favor of a more moderate candidate. The upshot is that the once-powerful conservative majority has lost its firm grip on the board.

But at Tuesday’s board meeting, they made a move that could lock in district leaders. Some parents and community members say it’s an effort to thwart the will of voters.

“This block is just grabbing power that they can wield in the minority to frustrate the will of the community,” said resident Dave Radlauer. Radlauer had filed a legal complaint seeking to block the vote, but was denied by a judge. He told LAist he's still deciding whether to continue to fight the action in court.

The district leaders and their supporters said the outcry over the contracts was overblown.

What happened in the election?

One board member on the conservative side, Shawn Youngblood, decided not to seek re-election this year. He was replaced by Tricia Quintero, who won 63% of the vote. Quintero is an elementary school teacher who campaigned on a platform of fiscal transparency and eliminating “divisiveness and partisan politics.”

Marilyn Anderson, who has repeatedly clashed with the board majority and Superintendent Alex Cherniss in recent years, won re-election.

That leaves the once-powerful majority potentially in the minority, though Quintero has said she'll make her own decisions and has not indicated publicly whether she wants to replace district leaders.

What is the current board proposing? 

At their meeting Tuesday, the board discussed amendments to the contracts for Cherniss and three other top administrators that would require a supermajority vote to dismiss them — four out of five board members — rather than a simple majority (or three votes). That means at least one of the two remaining members of the outgoing conservative faction would have to side with the new majority on any leadership changes.

They passed the amendments by a 3-2 vote.

Before the vote, the local teachers’ union sent a cease and desist letter to Cherniss and school board president Leandra Blades, saying the supermajority requirement would violate the state’s education code. In the letter, they called the proposed contract change “a naked attempt to shield the outgoing Board’s preferred administrators from termination once the newly-elected board is installed.”

In an interview with LAist, Blades called the union’s effort to block the contract changes “extremely hypocritical.” She said prior lame duck school boards had made similar supermajority requirements to oust former superintendents.

“I guess a supermajority vote is OK for the superintendents they like but not for the ones they don’t like,” Blades said.

Anderson, though, said there’s a difference: The contract changes require a supermajority to oust the superintendent even if there’s misconduct. “I’m concerned about the power grab,” Anderson said.

Nevertheless, requiring supermajority votes to dismiss superintendents — with and without cause — is not unusual. Cherniss shared with LAist numerous contracts in school districts throughout the state that require supermajority board votes for dismissal. It's unclear whether any were tied to the election cycle.

Cherniss also noted that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill last year intended to curb the sudden firing of superintendents after an election. The bill, SB 494, prohibits school boards from holding a special meeting to fire top district leaders within 30 days of being seated after an election. It was passed shortly after the newly seated Orange Unified School District board abruptly fired its superintendent in 2023 at a special meeting held during winter break.

Other proposed changes

A few other things on tonight’s agenda have caught the attention of critics:

• A proposal to add two additional meetings before the new board is sworn in.
  Blades told LAist it’s in case the proposed contract changes for Cherniss and other top administrators get held up in court. But critics worry the outgoing majority will try to push through more controversial changes.
• A public hearing on proposed changes to the charter petition for the Orange County School of Computer Sciences.
  The proposal would create an independent board to oversee the school, rather than be governed directly by the district school board. It would also absorb the district’s new Universal Sports Institute into the charter school, which some see as another power grab. (Blades said it would make it easier for athletes to access teachers.)
• The portion of the meeting designated for public comment was moved to the end of the meeting — after the vote on administrators’ contracts.
  Not allowing people to comment on agenda items as they come up could be a violation of the state Brown Act, said David Loy, legal director with the First Amendment Coalition. Ultimately, people were given time to comment on the contract changes and the charter school issue before the board's discussion, but comment on other agenda items was held until near the end of the meeting. "Public comment is not necessarily supposed to change board members’ votes,” Blades told LAist.

California clocked its second-worst snowpack on record Wednesday, a potentially troubling signal ahead for fire season.

It’s an alarming end to a winter that saw abnormally dry conditions briefly wiped from California’s drought map in January, for the first time in a quarter-century.

Though precipitation to date has been near average, much of it fell as rain rather than snow. Then March’s record-breaking heat melted most of the snow that remains. The state’s major reservoirs are nevertheless brimming above historic averages and are flirting with capacity, and a smattering of snow, rain and thunderstorms are dousing last month’s heat wave.

But experts now warn that California’s case of the missing snowpack could herald an early fire season in the mountains.

On Wednesday, state engineers conducting the symbolic April 1 snowpack measurement at Phillips Station south of Lake Tahoe found no measurable snow in patches of white dotting the grassy field.

“I want to welcome you call to probably one of the quickest snow surveys we’ve had — maybe one where people could actually use an umbrella,” joked Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources. “We’re getting a lot of questions about are we heading into a hydrologic drought? The answer is, I don’t know.”

State data reports that California’s snowpack is closing out the season at an alarming 18% of average statewide, and an even more abysmal 6% of average in the northern mountains that feed California’s major reservoirs.

Only the extreme drought year of 2015 beat this year’s snowpack for the worst on record, measuring in at just 5% of average on April 1st, when the snow historically is at its deepest.

“I think everyone's anticipating that it will be a long, busy fire season,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the UC Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources Fire Network.

“Without a snowpack, and with an early spring, it just means that there’s much more time for something like that to happen.”

‘It’s pretty bizarre up here’ 

In the city of South Lake Tahoe, which survived the massive Caldor Fire in the fall of 2021 without losing any structures, fire chief Jim Drennan said his department is already ramping up prevention efforts.

“It's pretty bizarre up here right now. It really seems like June conditions more than March,” Drennan said. “People are already turning the sprinklers on for their lawns.”

Without more precipitation, an early spring may complicate prescribed burning efforts. But Drennan said fire agencies in the Tahoe basin can start mechanically clearing fuels from forest areas earlier than usual.

“That means we can get more work done,” he said.

It also means homeowners need to start hardening their homes now, said Martin Goldberg, battalion chief and fuels management officer for the Lake Valley Fire Protection District, which protects unincorporated communities in the Lake Tahoe Basin’s south shore.

Goldberg urges residents to scour their yards for burnable materials, create defensible space and reach out to local fire departments with questions. The risks are widespread — from firewood, wooden fences, gas cans, plants, pine needles — even lawn furniture stacked against a house.

“In years past, I wouldn't even think of raking and clearing until May,” Goldberg said. “But my yard's completely cleared of snowpack, and it has been for a couple weeks now.”

‘A haystack fire’

Battalion chief David Acuña, a spokesperson for Cal Fire, said fire season is shaped by more than just one year’s snowpack.

Climate change has been remaking California’s fire seasons into fire years. And California’s recent average to abundant water years have fueled what Acuña called “bumper crops of vegetation and brush.”

“Most of California is like a haystack. And if you’ve ever seen a haystack fire, they burn very intensely because there's layers of fuel,” Acuña said.

Like Quinn-Davidson, Acuña wasn’t ready to make specific predictions about fires to come.

But John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced, said the temperatures and snowpack conditions this year offer a glimpse of California in the latter decades of this century, as fossil fuel use continues to drive global temperatures higher.

How this year’s fires will play out will depend on when, where and how wind, heat, fuel and ignitions combine. But it foreshadows the consequences of a warmer California for water and fire under climate change.

“This,” Abatzoglou said, “is yet another stress test for the future in the state.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Thousands of immigrants who are lawfully in California are set to lose their food assistance benefits, known as CalFresh, starting this month.

The new restrictions stem from H.R. 1 — also known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” — which Congress passed last year.

The changes remove eligibility for certain noncitizens, including people with refugee status and victims of trafficking. It also applies to immigrants from Iraq and Afghanistan who have special immigrant visas for helping the U.S. government overseas.

 ”These are folks … many of whom have large families that we have a commitment to as a country because we welcomed them and invited them here to find a place of refuge,” said Cambria Tortorelli, president of the International Institute of Los Angeles, a refugee resettlement agency. “They’re authorized to work and they’ve been brought here by the U.S. government.”

The federal spending bill, H.R. 1, made sweeping cuts to social safety net programs, including food assistance and Medicaid. In signing the bill, President Donald Trump said the changes were delivering on his campaign promises of “America first.”

Officials estimate 23,000 people in Los Angeles County will be affected. The state estimates about 72,000 immigrants with lawful presence will be affected across California.

CalFresh is the state’s version of the federally funded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Undocumented immigrants have not been eligible to receive CalFresh benefits.

State officials say noncitizens who are currently receiving benefits will continue to get them until it’s time to renew their benefits — adding that people might be able to receive benefits again if their legal status changes to lawful permanent residents.

Who the changes apply to:

• Asylees
• Refugees
• Parolees (unless they are Cuban and Haitian entrants)
• Individuals with deportation or removal withheld
• Conditional entrants
• Victims of trafficking
• Battered noncitizens
• Iraqi or Afghan with special immigrant visas (SIV) who are not lawful permanent residents (LPR)
• Certain Afghan Nationals granted parole between July 31, 2021, and Sept. 30, 2023
• Certain Ukrainian Nationals granted parole between Feb. 24, 2022, and Sep. 30, 2024