By Lee Corey and Yasmine Sarraf,
Media Editor and Editor-in-Chief.
If you’ve attended a Santa Rosa City Schools Board meeting in recent months you have likely heard local activist Adina Flores speak, even if you don’t know who she is. Her passionate, angry speeches during public comment are hard to miss, and her consistent attendance at board meetings in particular adds to her notoriety. But who is she, and what is she advocating for?
Flores’ involvement with the Board began when she was hired as executive assistant to the SRCS Board superintendent, a position she held from the summer of 2020 through January 2023. As the assistant to the Board superintendent, Flores acted as an intermediary between the superintendent and the community at large. “I was getting a lot of phone calls with things that were concerning to our community, and their concerns echoed my own after I began looking into them,” Flores said. When parents and students questioned why our campuses maintained a mask mandate while others dropped theirs, she was left feeling as if she “couldn’t give them answers because the County was unresponsive.”
These feelings led her to conduct a self-administered investigation into the Board. Through this investigation of records, text messages and emails, Flores discovered what she believed to be Board trustees allegedly “leveraging the vaccination rates of farm workers in exchange for wine grower investments.” Her findings led her to become disillusioned with the Board. Eventually, she was asked to resign for spending work time investigating matters unrelated to her employment.
Following her resignation, Flores filed a retaliation claim against the Board for sharing her personal medical information with other members of the staff during the period of her employment when she was most vocal about her views. While waiting for a settlement to come through, she continued to involve herself with the district, making an appearance at nearly every Board meeting to voice her opinions about malfeasance in the district.
Flores believes that her role in our district’s political scene is to educate and stated that she doesn’t “have a political party.” She explained that she didn’t know a lot about the functions of local government until she was a government employee. “I didn’t know you can go comment at meetings; I didn’t know how to read an agenda or understand the budgeting. So I think you guys should be learning that as students and so you can have a voice when you’re older,” she said.
The primary topic of her activism is the alleged corruption within the Santa Rosa City Schools District, the city government and local news sources. “The media is a propaganda piece locally. Our Sonoma media investments is owned by [Governor Gavin] Newsom, so they are very biased in what they report because anything that conflicts with their agendas at the state level, they’re not going to allow the legitimate story to be shared,” Flores claimed. She pointed out that in her view a lot of publicly available information is corrupted by the influence of money in the school district as well as local government. “The nonprofits are tax exempt, so that’s where everyone’s hiding money, and they just move it in a circle, and it’s really hard to follow,” she alleged.
Flores has many issues with the policies and practices of the school district. She believes that the removal of student resource officers from school campuses is “because people are getting nonprofit money for pushing that narrative.” She also disagrees with the narratives around race that are being taught in schools. “My issue is that. . . everyone does need genuine, legitimate representation. The propaganda they’re pushing by telling you that white students—that they have privilege and this, that and the other—I don’t agree with that either. These racial narratives are very upsetting for me,” said Flores.
Alongside deep frustrations towards the Board’s various policies, Flores has been highly critical of the budgeting decisions that led to the district’s current financial crisis. She believes that the Board seeks to benefit financially from bankruptcy in the district and is intentionally ignoring solutions to the budget deficit to allow for state intervention. “They want to hand the district over to the state because that means the state gets to come in and indoctrinate you guys further,” said Flores, believing that the Board will then ensure that students are “completely essentially illiterate.”
Flores received a settlement from the Board as a result of the claim she filed at the time of her resignation and has stated that she will no longer attend SRCS Board meetings. Nevertheless, she is continuing her activism locally, voicing her opinions in many parts of local government.
