In west Sonoma County, residents try to recall 3 school board members

The sunlight was just beginning to recede from the treetops in Forestville on a warm summer evening when Josh Nultemeier headed to quiet Pajaro Lane with a pen and three petition forms.

“Hi there,” Nultemeier said cheerfully each time someone opened their front door July 29. “My name is Josh, and I’m out here collecting signatures for the recall against the board members who voted to close our high school.”

An hour and a half later, having worked his way down the street, Nultemeier headed back to the recall table with eight signatures on each form. Treading back and forth across the street had secured a step toward his and a group of residents’ goal to put three school board members in the West Sonoma County Union High School District up for recall over their votes in March to consolidate El Molino and Analy high schools.

Nultemeier, who has worked for the Forestville Fire Department for 32 years, graduated from El Molino in 1991. He and his wife, Ame, a ‘93 El Molino graduate, are two of many west county residents angry at the school board’s decision last year to move El Molino students to rival Analy, consolidating the two campus communities into one to address a growing budget deficit.

Though formerly Analy and El Molino students will enter school on Aug. 12 incorporated under the temporary shared name of West County High School, these residents are hopeful the consolidation may itself only be transitory, too.

Recalling the three board members who voted in March to advance the consolidation, those advocates say, could give communities along the Russian River whose residents long attended El Molino the opportunity to swap in new trustees who could vote to reverse the consolidation in favor of other budget solutions.

The board members targeted in the recall — Board President Kellie Noe, Vice President Jeanne Fernandes and Trustee Laurie Fadave — say the recall is an expensive and ineffective solution, costing the school district potentially over $100,000 to hold an unscheduled election just months before three seats, including Noe’s and Fernandes’, go up for reelection next November.

Both women said in interviews in early August that they don’t plan on running to keep their positions when their terms expire next fall.

“I will not be rerunning,” Noe said. “I need to focus on my family, focus on my kids and this has been very emotional and hard for all of us.”

Some residents are skeptical, though. Ame Nultemeier said she doesn’t fully believe that the two most senior members of the school board will leave at the end of their terms.

"I do hope that it’s the case that they don’t run,“ she said. ”But at the point in the process that we’re at, our deadline is only three weeks away. So we’re not going to stop.“

The road to recall

Sonoma County voters are already set to vote Sept. 14 on two recalls that have qualified for the ballot: Gov. Gavin Newsom and District Attorney Jill Ravitch.

Only 36,035 people, about 12% of the county’s more than 300,000 registered voters, are eligible to weigh in on the recall question against the West Sonoma County Union High School District school board members, said Deva Proto, Sonoma County registrar of voters.

The recall organizers need to gather a minimum of 7,187 valid signatures to get the issue to a ballot, Proto said.

Milan “Mimi” Buttke, a Forestville resident and one of the lead organizers, said the group is aiming to collect closer to 9,000 signatures to ensure they have enough to qualify.

Buttke declined to provide an exact number of signatures collected so far because she said petitions are constantly coming in from sites and residents across the region. But she said the group is “generally at the halfway point.”

“We’re definitely on the road to meeting our goal,” she said.

The group has until Aug. 28 to turn in all collected signatures. After that, Proto’s office has 30 business days to determine how many of them are valid.

If the number of valid signatures meets or exceeds the minimum requirement, certification of the petition would be brought to the school board at its next regular meeting, Proto said.

Within 14 days of that certification, the school board would be required to issue an order of election, which would include setting a date for the election within 88 to 125 days.

All timelines considered, it’s likely that the election would be held sometime in February. That would be approximately a month before most final budget decisions are made, and nine months before the regularly scheduled November election.

To the recall organizers, if they managed to replace the board members with like-minded candidates, that time frame could be critical to achieving their goals. But another motivation exists, Ame Nultemeier said: to let the school board members know the community is dissatisfied with their decisions, and that the voters are willing to do something about it.

“We said so many times, ‘If you could just work with your community and find solutions together and create a budget that works for all of us, we would drop everything,’” she said. “And they absolutely refused to work with us.”

‘None of us are happy about this’

When Kellie Noe was a fresh-faced 28-year-old who had just been elected to the West Sonoma County Union High School District Board of Trustees in 2006, she had no children of her own and she and her husband Dennis Rosatti lived in Camp Meeker, part of the El Molino attendance area.

“I was inspired to run while I was thinking about ways to give back to the community,” said Noe, who now lives in Sebastopol. “I thought that was probably a good place for me to contribute.”

Even then, talks about the district budget were tense, Noe said. Enrollment was falling at both Analy and El Molino high schools, and fluctuating at Laguna High School, the district’s continuation school. The school district was spending more money than it was bringing in.

“Over the years we have done a lot to maintain the two-school model,” Noe said, including funding a marketing position to try to attract more students first to El Molino, which was experiencing the bigger enrollment decline, and then the district as a whole.

The school district’s financial woes only grew, though. Fernandes, who served on the school board from 1997 to 2010 and then was elected again after running unopposed in 2016, pointed also to what she described as insufficient funding from the federal and state government.

Heading into the 2020-2021 school year, the West Sonoma County Union High School District was facing a structural deficit of $1.2 million, which would surpass $2 million if unchecked by the 2022-2023 school year. The board broached the topic of consolidation by the 2021-2022 school year last fall.

Discussions between board members and the public about that idea and other possibilities to cut costs or increase revenue were from the outset full of passion, fear and anger.

Two tax measures that would have provided “bridge funding” to help push off consolidation for at least a year both failed to garner a two-thirds majority in March. At the next school board meeting, Noe, Fernandes and Fadave voted in favor of consolidation. Board members Julie Aiello and Angie Lewis voted against it, and the motion passed in a 3-2 vote.

A group of vocal El Molino parents responded in April by filing a lawsuit in Sonoma County Superior Court challenging the validity of the consolidation process under the state’s bedrock environmental law; the court date for that case is set for Sept. 22.

The school district’s tentative steps toward rebranding the combined campus in Sebastopol sparked the ire of the Analy High School alumni community in late spring. Though the name West County High School is considered a placeholder name until the students decide on a permanent one during the upcoming school year, alterations to the Analy campus pushed many Sebastopol families to join the recall effort.

"They’re not listening to the community,“ said Loretta Castleberry, an Analy alumna. ”When the board doesn’t listen, that’s our only recourse.“

Fernandes is also an Analy graduate, with several generations before her also graduates of the school.

“Ethically, it’s probably been harder for me than anybody else on the board,” she said. “But I have to stand by the fact that I feel we have to do what’s in the best interest of the kids, not alumni.”

Noe also stands by her votes on consolidation and pursuing a rebranding, though that timeline was delayed. Still, she calls the situation “awful.”

“None of us are happy about this,” she said. “This is not where we want to be.”

A costly but increasingly popular solution

Back on Pajaro Lane, 20-year-old Ivan Garcia was signing the forms Josh Nultemeier had brought.

“You’re not voting tonight,” Josh Nultemeier said to many of the people he approached that evening. “You’re just helping to put it on a ballot so we can vote on it.”

It’s a vote that, if the recall proponents are successful, could wind up costing the high school district anywhere from $90,000 to $160,000, according to an estimate provided by Proto, the county registrar.

Fernandes and Noe called the expense wasteful, in light of their plans to leave the board less than a year after any recall election would be held.

“Because you don’t agree with me is not a reason to put me up for recall,” Fernandes said. “This just means less money for kids.”

Fadave, who was elected to the school board only last November but taught at Analy for 17 years, said she understands where people are coming from in their desire to regain some sense of control by recalling her and the others. Noe and Fernandes echoed similar sentiments.

“The families of west county have had to endure more than their share of trauma over the last few years,” Fadave said in a text message. “I understand their sense of loss and the uncertainty about how this will affect their children. I am saddened, however, by the hostile and negative statements that have been directed at board members. It’s counterproductive.”

While the circumstances driving the division in the west county may be unique, frustrated residents turning to recalls as a political tool is not.

Troy Flint, public information officer for the California School Boards Association, said his organization is aware of an “unprecedented” number of recall efforts unfolding against school board members across the state. Many of them are over issues related to the pandemic, such as school closures and reopenings.

“The pandemic has really underscored the extent to which public schools are more than just education institutions,” Flint said. “They’re a hub of community that families rely on to allow their lives to function in a normal fashion.”

Regardless of whether the recall is successful in west Sonoma County, the school district board is due for a shake-up with the November election.

The school board will use the coming months to prepare to transition from the current at-large model to a by-trustee area model. A demographer’s report will help determine where the boundary lines will fall.

If more than one existing trustee winds up in the same zone, they may have to run again for control of the seat.

But a segment of the community, including Mimi Buttke, don’t want to wait until then. She is hopeful that neighborhood “blitz” events like the one that brought Josh Nultemeier to Pajaro Lane and the several dozen locations where recall petitions are still available to sign will pan out in their favor.

“I feel like I need to do everything I can to make sure they don’t control our futures any longer,” she said. “The quicker we can get them out of their seats, the better.”

You can reach Staff Writer Kaylee Tornay at 707-521-5250 or kaylee.tornay@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @ka_tornay.