Hey there Secular FAM! Happy Pride, Heathens!
And what a Pride month I’ve had so far! I started off in Mohave County for their annual Pride event, and took a much needed road trip in solitude. My friend created an incredible playlist for me, and I wondered at the majesty of the Redwood Forest and the Oregon Coast.
It was a reminder that this planet - this galaxy - will continue on in spite of the human race. We really are just stardust, and when you stand on the spongy floor of ancient forests and realize that it’s so spongy because of thousands of years of fallen pine needles, you realize just how insignificant we are in the grand scheme of things.
For me, it was a really good reminder about what’s important.
In Oregon, I “got back to the garden” admiring the vegetable gardens my hosts are cultivating. The trip grounded me, but it also fortified me for the rest of 2026.
Of course, during my absence, local school board member, Kim Fisher, in Deer Valley (DVUSD) with family ties to white supremacist groups went full fascist and threw up a Nazi salute during a recent board meeting. She also exclaimed “Heil! Heil!” to add emphasis to her bigotry.
Because she’s a narcissist who loves attention of any kind, Kim Fisher then went directly to her Facebook (as DVUSD President Carver predicted she would), and defended her decision to use Nazi language and hand signals.
The people of DVUSD and many others have organized a rally calling for Board Member Fisher’s resignation at tonight’s meeting (June 9, 2026). It will be interesting to see how her colleague, Board Member Pack, will react, since her statement was a series of contradictions that essentially blamed “leadership” for Fisher’s actions which I assume means President Carver and Superintendent Finch.
Statement: I don’t support Nazi salutes. I don’t support kissing people when having COVID to kill them jokes. I don’t support setting study sessions during parents’ work hours. I don’t support printing meeting notices and mailing them without board discussion. I don’t support making posts suggesting people go to someone's house or place of employment. I wrote this statement to address all of the bad behavior I’ve been asked about this week. These actions reflect poorly on our district and distract from the important work our community expects us to do.
While a governing board cannot remove one of its members, leadership can reflect on how situations such as these might have been de-escalated or avoided altogether. I hope this serves as an opportunity for all of us to reaffirm our commitment to professionalism, civility, and respect. Let us return our attention to DVUSD's mission of providing extraordinary educational opportunities for every learner. Let’s BE BETTER, DO BETTER.
If you want to show your opposition to Kim Fisher’s actions, sign up here.
But that’s not the ONLY school board meeting happening this week.
Peoria Unified (PUSD) will also meet tonight at 6:00, June 9, 2026. While there isn’t anything particularly compelling on the agenda, Board Member Heather Rooks has adopted a Scorched Earth strategy ever since she didn’t get the votes for an independent investigation a couple of months ago.
After running straight to the media and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office (MCAO), stakeholders inundated the governing board with calls for a special election, and Board Members Ewing and Proudfit went through legal counsel to make sure policy allowed for them to call for a special meeting. At this meeting, she was voted out of the presidency, and the temper tantrums haven’t stopped since.
The entire saga regarding PUSD scandals is too much to go into in this column, but Philip Haldiman with the Peoria Independent has done FANTASTIC reporting on the topic. I support good local journalism when I see it, and he’s a real one.
He recently offered a detailed timeline of events based entirely on fact. I know…a novel concept.
At this point, with all the facts available to the public in official files and transcripts, there is no indication that anyone at the site or district level covered anything up or that they didn’t do their jobs as mandated reporters. Based on the majority of the board and their recent votes, they don’t have any information that would contradict the six agencies that have or are currently investigating PUSD.
The problem is that two members of the board, Janelle Bowles and Heather Rooks govern and make decisions based on social media screenshots and anonymous accounts posting details that aren’t at all verified or supported by any evidence. Their Xitter feeds are a cornucopia of conspiracy theories and hate speech disguised as “religious freedom.”
What they don’t seem to understand is that they are jeopardizing the very thing that they say they care about the most: student safety. Every victim advocate on the planet will tell you that meddling in these investigations in an attempt to expose abusers may very well have a chilling effect on survivors choosing to speak up.
Ms. Rooks seems to care more about attention than student safety. When Pick-Me women like Ms. Rooks meddle into investigations to promote their political agendas, victims and witnesses don’t want to get pulled into their media circus. Since she’s now expressed her willingness to release confidential files and documents without children’s names redacted, I’m sure any other potential victims or witnesses REALLY won’t want to come forward.
And remember, Secular FAM, the school-aged children in PUSD could have had a resource to find answers to their difficult questions confidentially and with trained professionals, but in 2022, before getting elected, candidate Heather Rooks organized her followers to ultimately get the board to table it. One of the reasons given for why they opposed it was because the curriculum acknowledged and honored every kid as they came to them, gay, straight, or trans.
That worked so well that a few months later, Ms. Rooks made the decision to run on the “sexualization of children” not because she cared about that topic, but because she determined that running on the sexualization of kids in the classroom would be “appealing to parents.” Watch Rooks here.
Um…gross.
When you couple those words with her actions, and her desire to read the contents of the protected Title IX investigation, it seems that her obsession with children’s genitalia has crossed over into a sick kind of voyeurism.
We already know that her pal, Mia, likes reading sexual texts written by students out loud to an audience online for some weird reason.
Perhaps she and her followers were raised in some purity culture church where human sexuality is a sin and it leads to some pretty twisted ideas about appropriate sexual relationships. Maybe it was a place where the congregation regularly shames victims while protecting perpetrators of sexual abuse.
I don’t know if she attends church, but I do know that she isn’t a police investigator, Title IX investigator, journalist, attorney, mental health professional, criminal expert, or anyone else qualified and informed enough to make decisions about an active investigation that involves minors.
Her need for constant attention is jeopardizing an active investigation involving minors.
But see, they don’t really care about student safety. If they did, they wouldn’t have eliminated social workers or lobbied against Bloom365. They certainly wouldn’t continually accuse teachers and teachers unions of being pedophile protectors.
Their next board meeting is at 6:00, tonight, so if you want to share your thoughts with the PUSD Governing Board, the boardroom is located at 6333 W. Thunderbird Road. Emails also go a long way, Secular FAM, so we’ve got you covered:
Let them know that they should trust the experts. Not just in this investigation, but in many other areas. Whether it’s social workers, partnerships with mental health providers, curriculum oversight and approval, or the academic calendar, for crying out loud, this group has a track record of rejecting facts and expertise over emotions and MAGA talking points. Let them know that you’re tired of their partisan antics and focus on what’s really important: the kids.
