Quick Take
The Pajaro Valley Unified School District board of trustees will discuss and vote Wednesday on whether to censure fellow trustee Gabe Medina. Medina has faced rising criticism over comments directed at staff, current and former trustees and community members.
Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s governing board is set to vote Wednesday on whether to censure trustee Gabe Medina after he was accused of making antisemitic comments and engaging in disruptive behavior.
The proposed censure of Medina comes after Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools Faris Sabbah wrote a letter to the district late last month warning that he was “deeply concerned” by comments during an April 16 meeting where the board unanimously voted to sign a new contract with a controversial ethnic studies consultant.
Sabbah didn’t list the comments or state the names of trustees, but Jewish organizations and newspapers accused Medina and trustee Joy Flynn of antisemitism, citing Medina’s comments directed at several Jewish community members that he doesn’t “see you people at protests against immigration. I don’t see you at protests when people are being taken away right now.”
The outcry against the recent comments has elevated concerns about Medina’s behavior since he started attending board meetings last year as an activist supporting the district’s ethnic studies curriculum and since the start of his term on the board. Medina is a filmmaker from Las Lomas who grew up attending PVUSD schools and unseated former Area 3 trustee Oscar Soto in last November’s election.
The resolution to censure Medina lists eight different board bylaws and nine incidents where the board accuses Medina of poor behavior, including the accusations of antisemitism.
On April 23, during closed session, the resolution says Medina “yelled continually at fellow board members, repeatedly telling one board member to ‘shut the f–k up,” and told a fellow board member several times, “Come at me, Barbie!” Board members also accuse him of violating governing board laws when he brought up items that were not on the agenda, including a motion to censure former trustee Kim De Serpa.
If the Medina censure is approved Wednesday, he will be restricted from serving in a leadership role on the board until he completes governance and board leadership training. Lookout asked the district what the training entails, but PVUSD spokesperson Alicia Jimenez said the district has no further comment until Wednesday’s meeting.
Board vice president Misty Navarro commented on the censure in a post Monday on Facebook, saying Medina’s “behavior since joining the board (and even before) has been reprehensible.” On Tuesday, she declined to comment further to Lookout.
“He has only escalated and gotten far worse since this time,” she wrote in the post. “His actions are not conducive to the values we aim to instill in our children, nor do they contribute to the betterment of our students or our district.”
Navarro further wrote of Medina, “his persistent attacks on my reputation and his mistreatment of PVUSD staff, Board President Olivia Flores, Superintendent Dr. [Heather] Contreras, and former Chief Business Official Jenny Im are unacceptable. … Many of our staff and administration are fearful to speak out for fear of getting caught in his crosshairs.”
Medina didn’t return Lookout’s request for comment on Tuesday, but posted on Substack on Monday that he believes the censure is “politically motivated” and that he’s faced pressure to resign.
“I’m not surprised by the censure,” he wrote. “It’s what happens when someone refuses to stay quiet, refuses to play along, and refuses to abandon the people they were elected to serve.”
The censure resolution lists several other incidents that accuse Medina of unprofessional behavior.
They include a Jan. 15 meeting where Medina blocked an agreement with an Iowa Christian university to allow one of its student teachers work at MacQuiddy Elementary School. Medina pulled the agreement from the board’s consent agenda and refused to approve it because he said he was concerned it would bring student teachers into classrooms to emphasize their religion. He cited the history of religious institutions imposing their religion on Native people.
The board later reconvened to vote on the item again and unanimously approved it.
Additionally, Navarro has faced harsh comments from Medina since his election to the board, which was shortly after Navarro was appointed to the board to fill a seat vacated by Jennifer Holm. After Holm’s resignation, Navarro made two donations totaling $500 to then-trustee De Serpa’s county supervisor campaign. De Serpa was later part of the vote to appoint Navarro.
Medina criticized Navarro for the donations and said she should be called an interim trustee rather than a full trustee. Spokesperson Jimenez told Lookout at the time that the district wouldn’t comment on whether district counsel thought De Serpa should have recused herself from voting on Navarro’s appointment, saying that information falls under attorney-client privilege and is confidential.
In Navarro’s Facebook post, she also denounced Medina’s comments toward other district staff, including outgoing Chief Business Officer Jenny Im. After contentious meetings in February where the board rejected most proposals made by Im to implement budget cuts and layoffs, Medina accused Im and staff of failing to come up with other solutions. Im resigned in late February.
Medina pushed back against Im’s comments during a Feb. 12 meeting that the district had a multiyear plan with a range of different cost-cutting measures, saying he felt the district hadn’t done enough and was harming the community by cutting staff.
“You guys haven’t leveraged all your tools,” said Medina, saying that a potential solution to the budget could have been looking into filing lawsuits on behalf of Pajaro Middle School following the 2023 Pajaro River levee breach. He asked if the board had explored that.
Im responded by inviting Medina to join the staff in searching for more solutions and denounced him for his comments.
“Trustee Medina, you ran on a platform of respect,” she said. “I have never felt more disrespected than I have by you since I started.”
In addition to the resolution to censure Medina, the board on Wednesday will also be discussing a contract with an ethnic studies consulting organization, Facing History and Ourselves. The proposal says the firm helps school districts implement the state’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. If approved, the organization would provide ethnic studies instructors and district staff with six sessions focused on strategies for discussing controversial topics with students, activities to promote critical thinking and using resources to create student-centered experiences in the classroom.
Navarro told Lookout that the contract is on the agenda because the district didn’t discuss it when it was first brought before the board at the April 16 meeting. During that meeting, the board agreed to contract with two other consultants – Community Responsive Education (CRE) and Ignacio Ornelas Rodriguez – but didn’t discuss a proposed contract with Facing History and Ourselves.
Ornelas Rodriguez will help teachers add more local history in their curriculum. CRE, which previously worked with the district to help teachers and staff develop its own ethnic studies framework, will provide professional development training for the district’s administrators regarding PVUSD’s ethnic studies program.
The district had cut ties with CRE in 2023 after several community members raised concerns of antisemitism in a former draft of the state’s model curriculum put together by experts including CRE co-founder Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales.
Since that 2023 meeting, community members passionately urged the board to renew the contract with Community Responsive Education until the board ultimately did last month.
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