Outraged parents, many of whom voted for Newsom, might push the recall effort over the top.
Outraged parents, many of whom voted for Newsom, might push the recall effort over the top.
For parents like Clarissa Falen, California governor Gavin Newsom has been a letdown.
Falen, a Bay Area native, described herself as a lifelong Republican — “fiscal conservative, social liberal”— and said she broke party lines for the first time when she voted for Newsom, a Democrat, in 2018.
“I thought he would stand up to special-interest groups. And I thought he would be innovative in how to run California,” she explained, calling him the “most qualified” at the time.
But one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, Falen, a mother of two high schoolers who now lives northeast of Sacramento, has joined the growing chorus calling for Newsom to be recalled.
The reason? Newsom’s inability to get California’s public schools open.
In December, the governor — who has drawn scrutiny for sending his four children to a private school with in-person learning — introduced his “Safe Schools for All Plan,” which offered $2 billion in grants for elementary schools to return to in-person instruction. But the plan, which requires legislative approval, has been panned across the board, particularly by the state’s powerful teachers’ unions — including Newsom’s biggest donor in the 2018 governor race.
“You can see the writing on the wall that California government isn’t changing. And I think the combination of events has created that level of frustration, where parents have to find a voice to make change,” Falen said. “The recall effort seems one of those ways, and the loudest way, to get our voices heard.”
Recall efforts are common in California: There have been over 50 since 1939, and Newsom himself has faced five already in his first term. So far, the governor has largely ignored the current one, which began last February, and allies have dismissed its proponents as “pro-Trump extremists.”
—Yes, @CAgovernor Governor sidestepped question on his falling poll #s and reaction to recall, and plunged into a discussion of his administration’s latest moves to help business https://t.co/Vfia0h8kqt
— Carla ‘Bluechecked’ Marinucci (@cmarinucci) February 9, 2021
But Falen and other parents, fed up with the state’s decision to keep vast majority of schools closed since last March, pose a very different challenge — and could be the decisive factor in making the recall effort viable in a state where Republicans only represent a quarter of the electorate.
“I feel that the recall effort has become less of a partisan issue — say Republican, Democrat, etc. — and it’s been an educational issue,” Falen said.
Susan Ortega, a friend of Falen’s and also a mother of two, agrees.
“From what I can tell everyone has the point where they sort of snap and feel there is no other way to force a change than to recall,” Ortega — a Democrat who voted for Newsom but now supports his recall — told National Review. “For me, it was in September. For another friend, today. For one of our school board members, last week. In my school district at this point, our teachers will go back, but we have to hit a certain opening metric that’s very difficult. So a few weeks ago Newsom changed it for K–6 but not 7–12. People are tired of him having complete arbitrary control.”
Jason Barry, who lives north of San Diego in Solana Beach and started a “home school” for his daughter and her friends amid the shutdown, said he initially didn’t want to get involved in politics, but is now circulating the recall petition himself.
“I wasn’t born and raised in California. I’m kind of new to this landscape,” he said. “People are very liberal, very Democratic generally. And I’ve seen even people who have spent their lives here have such a bad taste in their mouth for what they’ve had to endure at the hand of the governor.”
So far, public polling has yet to address the question of whether angry parents are shifting towards recalling Newsom, whose office did not return a request for comment. But a recent poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found that Newsom’s sky-high approval rating of 60 percent last September has fallen back to Earth, with now 46 percent of voters approving of his performance and 48 percent disapproving.
Mark DiCamillo, director of the IGS poll, told National Review in an email that while the latest survey did not look at voter opinions on school reopenings, it is “an issue that we will likely cover” in future polls.
Randy Economy, a former local journalist in Southern California who serves as a spokesman for the recall, said that frustrated parents are a key part of the effort. “People are actually standing in front of schools with the petition getting people to sign it. Whatever people need to do — they’re just furious,” he said.
Economy estimated that 300,000 of 1.4 million signatories are Democrats, and he believes more are on the way. So far, California’s secretary of state has received over 723,000 signatures and has verified over 410,000 signatures as valid, with the deadline for new submissions being March 17.
“We’re very confident,” Economy stated. “We’re not going to stop until we get at least 1.8 to 2 million signatures.”
California election rules mandate that Newsom can be recalled if a petition’s signatures hits 12 percent of the votes cast in the most recent election — in this case, 1,495,709 signatures. Once the threshold is hit, a special election would be scheduled for later this year, with no limit on the number of candidates who can run against Newsom. Last week, former San Diego mayor and Republican Kevin Faulconer announced his campaign by arriving at a shuttered Los Angeles elementary school in a yellow school bus.
“Public schools should start safely reopening now,” Faulconer said. “Parents across California are fed up.”
While Newsom has at least gestured toward reopening schools through his “Safe Schools for All” plan, the California Teachers Association swiftly rejected the proposal, saying that teachers must be vaccinated before returning and that the plan’s acceptable case rate of 25 daily cases per 100,000 residents is far too high. Newsom said Tuesday that he hopes for a legislative deal by the end of the week, but the plan’s target of February 16 for the return of kindergarten through second grade looks unlikely, with still no timeline for middle and high schools.
Unlike other Democrats around the country, Newsom has so far been unwilling to take on the unions. “Our approach is not to do it top down and mandate,” he said in early January. “It’s to have a collaborative framework with real incentives.” On January 28, he admitted that “if we wait for the perfect, we might as well just pack it up and just be honest with folks that we’re not going to open for in-person instruction this school year.”
For parents like Ross Novie, who started parent group “LA Uprising” in December, Newsom’s tendency to indulge the teachers’ unions is unacceptable.
“What you would need is you need a strong governor to give everyone backup and say ‘this is a priority, we have to make it happen,’” he told National Review, citing the neighboring examples of Oregon and Washington. “They go, ‘okay, we’re doing this and if you’re going to fight me, you’re going to fight me, but I’m going to spend the political capital for this principle that children should be educated in person.’ That doesn’t happen here.”
Novie, a political independent — “I loathe both political parties equally” — said that California politicians are “dead meat” without the support of the teachers’ unions.
“That’s what the dynamic is: You either have political viability but cravenness, or you stick up for your principles and deal with it,” he explained.
He declined to say if he personally supported the recall, but added that Newsom’s stance on schools was “absolutely” contributing to the recall effort.
“You get a bunch of parents angry and upset, you’re losing a very important group of people,” he warned. “And with the damage received to our kids, it’s not going to just be forgotten. This is really a massive mistake for the governor and for all of the politicians.”
Novie said he hopes politicians understand that “there’s going to be hell to pay” for their failure to reopen schools.
“Like what are we doing? Really, is this a controversial point now? We don’t figure out how to educate kids as best as possible? This is up for debate too? Okay, we can do that,” he said.
Across California, where education is usually a local issue, parent-led grassroot groups are pressuring their school districts to reopen. But months of inaction and stonewalling have led to a realization that a statewide effort is essential.
Megan Bacigalupi, an Oakland mother with two elementary-school-aged children — one of whom has dyslexia — helped start OpenSchools CA, which launched on January 25 and now has over 70 chapters all over the state.
“We know we’ve got a couple weeks to really make that point in Sacramento, and so we’re doing the most we can both publicly and behind the scenes so that we’ve got leaders who are willing to put our kids first,” she explained.
Since the start of the New Year, Bacigalupi said there has been a noticeable spike in reopening interest among parents across the political spectrum, who were left disappointed when schools didn’t open in January. While her group is nonpartisan and has not endorsed the recall, she added that “I’m certain it’s adding pressure.”
Scott Davison, the father of an eighth-grader in Carlsbad whose reopening group is now involved with OpenSchools CA, said that the statewide organization’s political efforts have so far been stymied, and that the recall has come up internally as an additional option.
“They really thought we’d be able to influence some legislation and get something done, or at least work with the state to modify some rules to allow these schools to reopen,” he revealed. “They’ve been extremely frustrated, especially in the past week, to see a lot of these efforts fall apart. And they’ve even started grumbling about, ‘do we join recall movement?’”
National Review Reporter Ryan Mills contributed to this report.