SLO mayor calls for school board member who shared QAnon video, fake news to resign
San Luis Obispo Mayor Heidi Harmon and other community members on Tuesday called for a newly elected San Luis Coastal Unified School District board member to resign following social media posts that they called racist, homophobic and anti-science.
About 15 people spoke via Zoom at the district’s board meeting Tuesday night to demand that trustee Eve Dobler-Drew step down from her position.
The commenters raised concerns over Dobler-Drew’s now-deleted Twitter and Facebook posts, which included misinformation about Black Lives Matter protests, a post calling philanthropist Melinda Gates “satanic” and articles that advocated against abortion.
“Dobler-Drew has caused great harm with her words to the most minoritized amongst us,” Harmon said during Tuesday’s meeting. “It is unconscionable, to me, that our community would have on a board — charged with uplifting facts, knowledge, science and, most importantly, uplifting our youngest and most impressionable minds — someone who has expressed a proud and blatant disregard for basic human dignity for all people.”
Harmon also told The Tribune that Dobler-Drew likely won her seat on the board because “people had no idea this was going on,” and didn’t have the “bandwidth to research the school board election” this year.
The mayor shared on social media Wednesday a sign-up form for those interested in helping with efforts to recall Dobler-Drew from the school board.
Dobler-Drew, who has 25 years of teaching experience in San Luis Obispo County, earned a seat on the board after she won about 32.2% of the vote, or roughly 19,000 votes. Kathryn Eisendrath-Rogers, an incumbent, also won a seat with 42.3% of the vote.
The two beat incumbent Walt Millar, who earned just 25.6% of the vote.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Dillon Dean James said Dobler-Drew “told my mom at a Christmas party that I should look into the Changed Movement and see if I can get cured of homosexuality.”
That comment drew gasps from board members and tears from Eisendrath-Rogers.
Izzy Nino de Rivera, a student at San Luis Obispo High School and editor-in-chief for the high school’s student-run paper, Expressions, said she and other staff members of the paper reacted with “outrage” when they learned Dobler-Drew was elected to the board.
“LGBTQ students at SLO High School are already hyper-aware of homophobia,” Rivera said at the meeting. “They have also come out and said that they do not feel safe with Dobler-Drew on the board ... I’m here to stand with the community’s calls for Eve Dobler-Drew to resign.”
Amman Asfaw, a local youth leader and member of San Luis Obispo’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, said during Tuesday’s meeting that the board should update its policies, especially regarding social media.
The board’s policy “mentions social networking sites, but it doesn’t hold people accountable for anything they say on social media,” Asfaw said. “It just says that social media statements made by individuals (on the board) may cause confusion and controversy — which I think, clearly, we can all see we’re at that point.”
One individual, Lorie Noble, said Dobler-Drew should not resign and that “we actually need new opinions on our school board, and she clearly won a seat.”
In a written statement sent to The Tribune on Tuesday night, San Luis Coastal Unified School District Superintendent Eric Prater said that board members, along with all employees of the district, are responsible for serving and caring for all students, and genuine efforts must be made to confront biases, life-long assumptions, systems, structures and personal beliefs that “undoubtedly harm students.”
“Heidi Harmon is a fierce advocate for equity, inclusivity, and students in our community. I admire and share in that advocacy,” Prater wrote. “With that said, however, I believe Ms. Dobler-Drew deserves an opportunity to demonstrate her advocacy for our students and school community.”
Dobler-Drew and the other school board members could not immediately respond to the comments during the meeting, citing Brown Act restrictions.
Near the end of the meeting, which ended at 9:40 p.m., only Eisendrath-Rogers addressed the public comments made regarding Dobler-Drew. The other six board members, including Dobler-Drew, declined to comment.
“I hope (the commenters tonight are) heard by Eve, and that she does the right thing,” she said. “In my opinion, that would be stepping down from the board.”
Board member shared QAnon video, fake news during election
While she was running for a seat on the board, Dobler-Drew shared several posts to her Facebook and Twitter pages that have since been deleted. The Tribune obtained screenshots of those social media posts.
Posts shared by Dobler-Drew urged people to “vote against Democrats because they support (Black Lives Matter)“ and claimed that COVID-19 was designed in a Wuhan, China, laboratory. Scientific evidence contradicts the latter claim, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In January, Dobler-Drew shared a YouTube video on Facebook promoting the Changed Movement, which encourages people to “overcome” their LGBTQ+ sexual orientation or gender identity through therapy and religious support.
Some experts equate overcoming one’s sexual orientation or gender identity with conversion therapy, which is a “dangerous and discredited” practice, according to the Human Rights Campaign.
Dobler-Drew told The Tribune in October she does not support conversion therapy, and does not “support anything that tries to strong-arm a person or influence them to go a certain way in what their self identity is.” That includes, she said, those “trying to persuade people to be in the LGBTQ group.”
In May, Dobler-Drew shared on Facebook a video titled “Follow the White Rabbit” that has since been taken down. The video shows an edited version of a 2016 campaign speech by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, with images of Hillary Clinton and other subjects of the speech shown.
At the end of the video, the words “now comes the pain,” and “WWG1WGA,” a QAnon slogan meaning “where we go one, we go all” appear along with “QAnon Follow the White Rabbit.”
QAnon is a “far right-wing, loosely organized network and community of believers who embrace a range of unsubstantiated beliefs,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
San Luis Coastal trustee says posts are ‘part of the past’
Those social media posts were purged from Dobler-Drew’s social media accounts before voting for the election began.
Board member Chris Ungar, who ran uncontested for a seat on the San Luis Coastal school board, said that though the posts themselves were concerning, he was also worried that she deleted the posts.
“What concerns me is when a candidate is trying to hide important information about themselves that voters should be able to see,” Ungar told The Tribune in October.
Dobler-Drew said she deleted the social media posts because she was pursuing a “non-partisan, non-political school board position.”
“All those tweets are part of the past. Those things are past history, and don’t have any bearing on what I’m doing now,” she previously told The Tribune.
This year is “a year of new beginnings,” Dobler-Drew said. “My new beginning was to step up and try to give back to the community.”
Cuesta College, Paso Robles board members face controversies
Dobler-Drew is not the only local school board member who has faced backlash over content posted online.
Chris Arend, a school board member for Paso Robles Joint Unified School District, wrote an opinion piece for Cal Coast News in September that said systemic racism is a “myth.” After publication, several community members spoke out at board meetings and called upon the board to address the issue of systemic racism.
Arend was elected board president in a Paso Robles Joint Unified School District board meeting on Tuesday.
Peter Sysak, a member of the Cuesta College Board of Trustees, was recently censured due to posts he shared on his personal Facebook page, which critics called racist, homophobic, misogynistic, anti-immigrant and more.
Sysak was also ousted as president of the Cuesta College board.
He has not stepped down after numerous calls for his resignation.
This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 10:00 AM.
