Teacher Unions Financially Doom District

To give credit where credit is due, teacher unions truly embrace the proverb, “Actions speak louder than words.” Taxpayers in Orange County are learning in real-time just how devastating it is to allow teacher unions the opportunity to carry out the axiom.

According to this article, the Orange Unified Education Association ( a local NEA Affiliate) colluded with teacher unions across California to oust two conservative board members, and replace them with union-backed puppets. 

Union leaders built their March recall campaign around a single charge: “extremists” had taken over the board and were dismantling public education. As evidence, they seized on the board’s adoption of a “parent-notification” policy that would require parent authorization before teachers and other school employees engage in gender transitioning children in the district’s K-12 schools. 

The teacher union campaign included letters to the editors of local newspapers, teams of doorknockers, phone banking and yard signs. Most significantly, union activists packed school board meetings, shouting down conservative trustees and parents – and then blamed the board for the chaos.

We have to pause for a moment here. The example of “extremism” used by the union was requiring that parents authorize the gender transition of K-12 age children at school. Even if you live in a very conservative state, your local NEA affiliate will never disavow this as scandalous. They can’t. It comes down from the top, and they will push it in your local schools as soon as they have the power. 

The story doesn’t end there. 

Shortly after a successful March recall campaign in which leaders of the Orange Unified Education Association replaced two conservatives with two union-backed trustees, the newly configured board promptly awarded teachers a 10 percent pay hike. 

That pay hike has blown a hole in Orange Unified’s finances, documents obtained by California Policy Center reveal.

In a September 13 memo to district officials, assistant superintendent Sulema Holguin reported that the post-recall pay increase has driven the district toward financial collapse.

The unions are literally parasitizing the host to death. They mobilized their entire apparatus to “protect the children,” planning the entire time to greedily sap the district financially until it expires. This is what union “community activism” really looks like.

Even as the union alleged that “outside money” had elected “extremists,” CTA itself confirmed that it directed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the district from union locals all over the state. In a June proclamation, CTA characterized the recall as a triumph of community activism – while more quietly underscoring the critical role of other teacher union locals in bankrolling the campaigns of the union-friendly candidates”

Surely this is just a one-off in a liberal area of a liberal state. Teacher unions don’t plan to use the same playbook elsewhere. Right?

Urroz makes it clear that state union leaders saw the Orange school board takeover as a kind of test for future efforts all over California. “They’re seeing it as ‘Orange is the pilot,’ if you will: if they can succeed here in Orange then they know they can go to other districts and do the same thing.” 

Teacher unions are not about public education, and they never have been. They exist to siphon as much money out of the system as possible, and translate it into political power. Children and schools are instrumental to their plans, but are quickly discarded as collateral damage when convenient. 

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