Parents and children walking to Monte Vista Elementary School last Friday were wearing green for School Pride Day when they were confronted by three people shoving a flyer into the parents’ hands. It charged that eight Democrats running for office were in agreement with what the flyer called Santa Barbara Unified’s “child porn in public schools.” On the page were panels from Gender Queer, a graphic memoir found in Santa Barbara High’s library. It depicted two young people having oral sex and a conversation marked with a heart.
“The people were yelling, ‘Take it! Take it! You need to know! You’re in the dark!'” said Jennifer Yau, who had walked with her three children to school that day. “I was curious, so I took one,” she said, even though the principal had told her it wasn’t school-related.
That Friday was Coffee with the Principal Day, as well as School Pride Day. Principal Hans Rheinschild was all set to meet parents; instead, several brought him the flyers. “Three people were at the end of the driveway, on school property where there’s a stop sign, and they were handing it out as people stopped,” Rheinschild said. As he walked down the driveway, he called the Hope School District superintendent, Anne Hubbard, who hotfooted it over to Monte Vista.
The three kept coming back to the driveway despite Rheinschild’s warning he’d call the police, and they didn’t move away until after he called 9-1-1. When Hubbard got there, she explained to them that Monte Vista was not in the Santa Barbara Unified School District, nor was it involved with the high school’s sex education.
Hubbard said that when she pointed out the sole person on their list who was a candidate in the Hope district, one woman, Miki Hammel, claimed the person had lied about her son, who had been disciplined in high school.
By then, a police officer had arrived and iterated that the three were not allowed on the school campus.
It was an episode in the culture wars now taking place throughout the country and in Santa Barbara. The problem here is that the flyer was highly inaccurate: The book is not a textbook. It is in the Santa Barbara High School library, clear across town from Monte Vista and the Hope School District. And it was selected by accredited school staff; not one of the candidates listed had anything to do with it.
One of the three at Monte Vista was Thomas Cole, who manages political campaigns under the name Analytics 805. His website indicates he supports conservative candidates, and it identifies “rabid leftists” and expresses a belief that some candidates of color were “racist.” Asked about the incident at Monte Vista, Cole replied in an email, “We are handing out flyers to parents that contain images from SBUSD textbooks that currently reside in our local school libraries. We have masked the offending parts, but still parents are shocked to see these materials are in our schools.” He argued that the Santa Barbara Unified School District’s teen sex education program was “radical” and that Democratic officials agreed with the program, as well as what he called gender training, anti-American training, and critical race theory.
Cole protested that he and his group were consistently “ignored, derided, belittled,” and kept away from any decision-making process, and the trio had complained to Hubbard that local media did not pick up their issues. Numerous calls to Miki Hammel were not returned. She is the treasurer for her husband Greg Hammel’s run for Goleta Water Board. He also ran for Goleta School Board in 2020. He belongs to the conservative group Fair Education, which recently bragged it had ruined the high schools’ “woke” racial equity contractor.
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Hammel has a confrontational past with progressive youth groups. Earlier this year, he was kicked out of a Zoom meeting with Future Leaders of America, which he claimed he was attending with his son for community service hours. Hammel accused the teens of reading from scripts prepared by adults, which the young people protested strongly. The moderator shut down Hammel’s link after he disrupted the meeting with what was described as “incoherent rants.”
The tactics being used by this small group appear to be aimed more at provocation than persuasion. Anne Hubbard pointed out that the trio was at the wrong school; Monte Vista is in Area 2 — with an unopposed school board candidate — and the only Hope District candidate on the flyer is running in Area 5, which surrounds Vieja Valley Elementary. The Area 5 candidates are Frann Wageneck, a longtime employee in the Santa Barbara school district, and Dani Blunk, who appeared in a forum emceed by Tracy Henderson, founder of California Parents Union. Henderson, who is from Carmel, said she formed the union to organize parents opposed to pandemic restrictions and an over-sexualized curriculum in order to gain an upper hand over teachers unions. Two Goleta school board candidates also spoke at the forum: Caroline Abate and Christy Lozano. Abate was a regular speaker at the County Board of Supervisors against facemasks and vaccines. Lozano had a failed run for county education superintendent in June, despite a boost in notoriety from her appearance on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program to speak against Santa Barbara schools’ anti-racism materials for teachers.
The book in question, Gender Queer, was not part of the high school sex ed materials, said Nick Masuda, a spokesperson for S.B. Unified, but was a memoir by a nonbinary, gender-neutral individual. The novel was highly controversial among some circles for its explicit drawings of author Maia Kobabe’s struggles with understanding eir sexuality — Kobabe uses the pronouns “e,” “em,” and “eir.” It nonetheless won the Alex Award from the American Library Association for ages 12 through 18. Though high school libraries have equally explicit graphic novels of heterosexual love and sex, Masuda said no one has challenged those books to the Board of Trustees.
Masuda emphasized that Gender Queer was important for a district that wanted to be inclusive and make sure every person saw a reflection of how they chose to be. “It’s a graphic novel about falling in love. And it’s important for everyone to feel represented, to feel recognized,” he said. “It’s healthy.”
Hope School District Superintendent Hubbard said very few people attended her board’s meetings, so she’d know if any of the three had ever come to one. She gave them her card and cell phone number, nonetheless, as well as a piece of her mind. “I have a gay daughter, a Black son, a Hispanic grandson, and biological white children,” Hubbard said. “I told them every kid was supposed to feel comfortable and welcome at the Hope district, and if you have a problem with that, you have a problem with me.”
Prinicipal Hans Rheinschild said that about a dozen parents were waiting to have coffee with him when he got back to his table, and it turned into a discussion of school procedures and campus safety. “We were able to talk about it, and the whole thing died down immediately,” he said.
As Jennifer Yau walked home that morning, she saw one of the women walking her dog. She’d clearly cooled off by that point, Yau said. “I told her I appreciated how she felt, and that Monte Vista parents were open to discussing what kids are being taught in school. But I told her it was totally inappropriate to be distributing flyers like this. She agreed it probably wasn’t the greatest idea.”
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