Residents of the tiny East Bay town of Sunol, California like to say that it used to be a tight-knit community. Bordered by chaotic commuter roads, just over a hill from Silicon Valley, the census designated place (population 920) abuts a wilderness preserve and vibes like a rural haven.
Horse ranches dot the rolling hills; families join 4-H, and civic life revolves around the K-8 Sunol Glen School, the town’s lone school, with about 270 students.
But more than a year ago, this prosperous country town lost its peace and it has yet to find it again. Friends have become enemies, heads have rolled and more than three months after a hard-fought close school board recall election, neighbors remain suspicious and resentful of each other. Signs for competing candidates hang on fences. A new election in November will pit familiar antagonists against each other all over again.
It turns out that even a secluded enclave where everybody knows everybody is no refuge from the nation’s culture wars.
Sunol’s fight started like many others: with a gay pride flag. A few parents complained about a pride flag flying outside the school. One month later, after a chaotic meeting, the Sunol Glen Unified School District voted 2-1 to ban all banners but government flags. That vote came after a parent threatened to sue the district for displaying what he called one “special interest” flag (pride) over another (say, the Gadsen “Don’t Tread on Me” flag). This argument, used in other pride flag bans, seemed reasonable to some. To others, in Sunol and well beyond it, it announced that the culture wars had arrived.
Before Sunol, a pride flag ban was unheard of in deep blue Alameda County. Not to mention the vote came only one month after a neighboring district, San Ramon Valley Unified School District in (also deeply blue) Contra Costa County, beat back efforts to curtail Pride events. Somehow, far-right groups such as The Heritage Foundation and Moms for Liberty, its close ally, had managed to rebrand the flag — at least to conservatives. To them, the rainbow banner created in San Francisco in 1978 represented not inclusion but special interests that may impede religious liberties. This even in the cradle of the Pride movement.
After Sunol, residents of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, who had begun monitoring the anti-LGBTQ+ parental rights groups disrupting local school board meetings, decided to band together. About 150 organizers — parents, teachers, students, and concerned citizens — first met in April (after many Zoom meetings) with one overriding goal: to stop the chaos roiling school boards and rending communities. In short, to avoid another Sunol.
Several months in, the bicounty coalition Lift Up Public Schools, or LUPS, has more than 250 members and hundreds of allies in affiliated groups. It monitors a dozen school board elections in Contra Costa County and two dozen school board elections in Alameda County, all to be decided in November. Volunteers do everything from canvassing and making calls to hosting forums and sharing information on relevant events and groups, all while accelerating a national movement.
More and more communities are tackling and knocking out the parental rights groups. In the last year, their endorsed candidates have lost more races than they’ve won, even in conservative districts. Pride flag bans are facing a backlash, with those who pushed for them sometimes being recalled — again, even in conservative districts. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who codified Moms for Liberty’s positions against mentioning race or gender in schools (as with the state’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law), has acknowledged that widely unpopular book bans have gone too far.
As for Moms for Liberty, which still calls itself a “nonpartisan” grassroots group, it has racheted up culture war conspiracy theories that are inspiring a groundswell of opposition, said Liz Kelly Mikitarian, founder of STOP Moms for Liberty.
Moms for Liberty, which says it has 130,000 members in 48 states, is pushing easily disproved notions (repeated by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on the campaign trail) that public schools are a pipeline to secret sex change clinics performing forced gender reassignments on children.
“They’ve doubled down on the most bizarre conspiracies,” said Mikitarian, a retired kindergarten teacher (and disaffected Republican) who founded STOP Moms for Liberty in Brevard County, Florida, in 2022 in the same school district where Moms for Liberty was born in 2021.
As the election season has heated up, so has STOP Moms for Liberty, she said. The unfunded social media-driven movement has grown to at least 25,000 members in 46 states, according to Mikitarian.
She added that it has grown so fast that it has had to create organizing structures — a membership director, diversity director, senior advisory team and national advisory board. It is also partnering with two allies, Democracy and Education and the School Board Integrity Project, on a national school board project.
The Contra Costa County chapter of STOP Moms for Liberty has become the national organization’s most active, Mikitarian said. Beyond strong leadership, she said, the group has been organizing with committed partners it keeps finding and joining with for the cause. “It’s a model for how grassroots organizing can be done,” Mikitarian said.
In the Bay Area, where the backlash against the parental rights groups is robust, LUPS works closely with the Alameda County and Contra Costa County chapters of STOP Moms for Liberty, PFLAG of the San Ramon Valley and the American Association of University Women.
These groups, with hundreds of members apiece, have their own school board projects. They also share information, support actions and join with other groups — some established, some, like LUPS, springing up to tackle numerous school board elections, including Sunol’s upcoming school board election, the result of its July 2 recall.
Erica Dahl, a LUPS founder who also founded the Contra Costa County chapter of STOP Moms for Liberty (with 280 members), said the group attracts volunteers because it is not merely protesting the “extremists.” The Contra Costa Chapter also shares information, supports work outside LUPS territory and outside the Bay Area and continues to grow partnerships to outlast the election cycle. “We wanted to do more than play Whac-a-Mole,” she said.
Underscoring the growing pace of the movement, Dahl, a teacher of deaf and hard of hearing children in Alameda County, also leads the California state chapter of STOP Moms for Liberty, with five subgroups (Contra Costa, Alameda, Yolo, Shasta and Placer counties) and the Western region (Nevada, Washington, Wyoming, Oregon and Alaska).
Among the many volunteers who’ve made the election a full-time job, Ogie Strogatz, a long-retired community volunteer in Contra Costa County, helped found LUPS as a member of an East Bay chapter of the American Association of University Women. She had committed to attending and monitoring every one of her local school board meetings and found something “exciting” about bumping into other community members doing the same, she said.
Once the coalition was formed, and the groups began to grow and coalesce, Strogatz was able to skip a meeting to attend a protest or hold a forum or do candidate interviews — in other words, to participate in other important components of the movement, she said.
“The idea of really good organizing is that you broaden and deepen the variety of people who are willing to speak out,” she said. “The metaphor in organizing is that it’s like being in a choir and holding a really long note. You can take your breath and know that the rest of us are holding it. ”
Of course, the results of all these efforts won’t be clear until November. As with the presidential election, both sides are working furiously and assuming nothing.
“We are solely focused at this point on three things,” Mikitarian said. “That’s helping people to hold their current school boards accountable, restoring more sanity on these school boards and really focusing on Project 2025, the conservative playbook largely written by Trump’s former aides and confidants.”
She won’t predict what will happen this election.
Dahl was also circumspect. Since the fate of the school board wars depends partially on who wins the presidential election, it is hard to claim victory just for having momentum, she said.
Still, from the ground, “It feels like we can do this,” Dahl said as she headed out to another school board meeting. “It feels like we’re winning.”
