Candidate Profile: Superintendent of Public Instruction
Save the Children, Vote for Lance Christensen!
I will be dedicating the next few articles to education related candidate profiles, starting with the top—California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and then will profile all of the local candidates for DSUSD Board of Education.
Lance Christensen is an excellent choice to replace the status quo, which now has a leftist ideologue, Tony Thurmond, sitting in the top spot. Thurmond in that position guarantees a smooth implementation of all of the sickening education legislation coming out of the democrat supermajority controlled California legislature— seemingly led by the sickening Senator Weiner (D-San Fran).
Lance Christensen is a 6th generation Californian, married and the father of five—the youngest in kindergarten while the oldest is a recent high school graduate. Lance hails from Sacramento County, but has attended and spoken at DSUSD board meetings and to our group of education watch dogs here in Indio.
Lance graduated from BYU and spent a short time as a 4th grade educational assistant in Colorado before enrolling in Pepperdine’s Grad school for Public Policy, where he studied Education Theory. After Pepperdine, Lance was an education consultant for the California State Senate for 15 years. Lance also oversaw the budget for the newly formed Department of Juvenile Justice which brought educational options to the State’s incarcerated youth. Lance also helped develop proposition 98, which established minimum funding levels for California schools, ran for his local school board and served on that district’s finance committee. Lance is “recognized as an education policy and budgetary expert, he is the Vice President of Education Policy and Government Relations at the California Policy Center.”
Lance Christensen has an impressive “First Five Action Items” that he will immediately address when in office. They include:
Immediately suspend all curriculum framework currently being reviewed by the California Department of Education (CDE) and re-open the public review process for those frameworks, bringing much needed increased public scrutiny over the process that has recently brought California horrid frameworks such as Ethnic Studies, Sex Ed, and fanatical adherence to the cultural-marxist Common Core.
Order a “Kids First” audit of the CDE and “any positions or programming not explicitly authorized in statute or the 2022-23 budget’s legal citations and authorities will be reallocated or eliminated.” In addition, Lance will “propose any program that does not prioritize children’s education at the local education authority be omitted in future budget proposals. I will regularly be asking the legislature to have the funds follow the children with as little bureaucratic bloat as possible.”
Reclassify an existing advisor position in the Superintendent’s office as the Chief Parent Advocate, who will serve as the liaison for all issues and concerns brought forth by parents.
Invite every school board member and Superintendent in California to a town hall for the purpose of discussing “constitutional authorities and responsibilities and where the State Superintendent’s office can appropriately defer or relinquish authority to local education officials under current law.” The goal would be to simplify the education process and return control to the local level as much as possible. Something the current (and recently resigned) board members have absolutely abdicated without so much as a whimper.
Form a “Red Team Task Force” to recommend changes to the Educational code, through a public process, in order “to improve public education and protect parental authority.”
Lance is all about the parents and the kids, and will surely obliterate the leftist indoctrination that is currently gripping a majority of California school districts, including Desert Sands Unified School District. To be sure, local district leadership could have chosen to stand up for our kids, our parents, and at least some of our teachers/staff—we have to face the fact that the DSUSD is led by, and has been hiring, virtue-signalling activists rather than critical thinking educators and administrators as of late.
There is a lot of work to do in the DSUSD to undo the damage from the last few years (or decades), but they need all the help they can get at the State level, which is currently in totalitarianism mode. Lance Christensen is that help.
This is what California is up against:
I have had the pleasure to meet Lance a few times now, and he is a very intelligent, personable, down-to-earth, approachable guy. We need him in this office, bigly!
Vote for Lance Christensen for Superintendent of Public Instruction and encourage everyone you know to do the same!
Great article.
Lance has my vote.