A passerby would never know it from the tranquillity of Orange's quaint downtown, with its old-fashioned drugstore and traffic circle, but this city is home to one of the most fractious, battle-scarred school systems in the state.
Name an education-related hot button and the Orange Unified School District has pushed it to the point of pitched battle. Bilingual education. Gay clubs on campus. Clinics at schools. Teachers deserting the district en masse.
Now, two classically opposed groups are the main forces behind a mudslinging recall campaign against three school board members, a campaign that is drawing interest from around the state and as far away as Washington, D.C. The Christian conservative movement, which has made no bones about its antipathy to teachers unions, is supporting the last high-profile school board in the region to have a hard-line conservative majority. And the mighty state teachers union is throwing its weight behind the recall effort.
"This is like the Arabs and Israelis," said Louise Adler, chairwoman of the Department of Educational Leadership at Cal State Fullerton. "They have turned Orange into Jerusalem."
If the community is ground zero for an ideological showdown, it's not readily apparent on the streets and in the sidewalk cafes of Old Towne, where young kids zip on skateboards in front of vintage buildings that date to the city's orange-growing origins in the 1880s.
For the locals, the recall campaign will probably be most visible in mailboxes, which are likely to be stuffed with last-minute mailers as Tuesday's election approaches.
For outsiders, though, the recall campaign has become a referendum on issues that extend far beyond district boundaries.
The establishment GOP is vigorously backing the board members in what is supposed to be a nonpartisan election and has staked its influence on the outcome; on the other side, the California Teachers Assn. is committed to seeing the board go down.
"You've got a board whose view is there shouldn't be a union and a union radicalized by all these years of conflict," said Adler, an expert in administrative conflict and the politics of education who has been active in the county's Democratic Party. "Both sides have blown it."
A personal appeal mailed to Republican voters from Orange County GOP Chairman Tom Fuentes encouraged contributions of $100 to stop "the Democrats and union bosses." (Two of the replacement candidates are registered Democrats, although the Orange Recall Committee is dominated by Republicans.)
