At a meeting for educators held at a church on March 19, 2023, Rocklin school board president Julie Hupp expounded her strategy for insulating local districts from the influence of the California Teachers Association and thereby stripping teachers of protection against parent objections to curriculum.
“We need more faith-based site reps,” said Hupp. She used the example of a parent objecting to a book taught in their child’s classroom to illustrate the power of a “faith-centered, value-based, family-centered” site representative to prevent the CTA from coming to the teacher’s defense. In her example, the representative tells the teacher to meet with the parent and find a suitable substitute for the text rather than passing the teacher’s call for assistance on to the union president.
She went on to criticize the California Teachers’ Association, accusing it of gaslighting parents. “We have to set up as many layers as we can to protect our kids, to protect our families, to protect our classrooms,” she said.
Hupp described how she used her position to block CTA involvement in her own district. “As the president in Loomis, all of the emails come to me, all CTA requests for action come to me. All of it comes through me,” she said.
She credited the influence of “faith-based” site representatives with getting students back into the classroom as early as possible during the pandemic. In one district, she said, just two out of thirty representatives aligned with her views. “There might’ve been some secret meetings that happened with those two and they may have been given some ideas and thoughts about what to do, and they may have gone back to their union president and talked to them and said, this isn’t acceptable. We don’t all feel the same way you do,” she said. The union president in the district ended up backing down.
The audio recording of the meeting was shared on Facebook on Saturday, just weeks after Hupp received backlash for a post made on an official Rocklin USD account calling for “as many Christ-centered, family-focused parents as we can get” on district advisory committees.
