Sonja Shaw didn’t set out to run for statewide office. She was just looking for straight answers from local school officials during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I never wanted to be in this. I still don’t want to be in it,” Shaw said. “I just want things to change.”
Today, she’s president of the right-leaning Chino Valley school board that oversees a district with about 26,500 students.
But if she wins Nov. 3, she’ll be California’s new state superintendent of public instruction. Shaw’s facing off against San Diego Unified School District board President Richard Barrera, after coming in first place in a 10-person race in the June 2 primary.
“She’s a change from the old guard, not a career politician owned by special interest groups from either side,” said Redlands Unified School District board member Candy Olson, a Shaw fan.
To win, Shaw, 44, will need to snap a 20-year losing streak for Republicans seeking statewide office in California. That means convincing Californians that her conservative beliefs — on notifying parents about their children’s gender identity, keeping transgender students out of girls’ sports, banning flags in the classroom, supporting prayer at board meetings and banning books that tackle mature subjects — are mainstream points of view.
“She may be the most unqualified candidate ever to run for state superintendent of public instruction,” said Chino resident and former school board candidate Lisa Greathouse. “But all of that pales in comparison to how harmful and divisive her policies have been to our community.”
Political awakening came during pandemic
Shaw says she always believed in Chino Valley Unified.
“I just believed the leaders weren’t doing the right thing,” Shaw said. “They didn’t give us parents a seat at the table.”
It started with COVID-19 and the decision to shut California’s schools and have students take classes online.
At the time, Shaw was working nights at a grocery store.
“And then coming home to my kids having to start their school day on the computer,” she said. “It was just a nightmare and no one knew what was going on at first. And then eventually I was, like, ‘this isn’t going to work.’”
Her two daughters were athletes used to being outside with other kids.
“When people say ‘You’re just a soccer mom,’ I love it,” said Shaw, who has worked as a personal trainer.
She recalls seeing the psychological toll of being trapped all day inside the family’s Chino townhouse during the coronavirus lockdown on her kids.
The family moved its daughters into a charter school while it waited for Chino Valley Unified School District campuses to reopen. And Shaw connected online with other frustrated parents.
“Eventually, somebody said ‘You need to go to a school board meeting,’” Shaw said. “I was, like, ‘What is that?’”
Upset parents became a regular feature at Chino Valley school board meetings, with Shaw often out front in confronting board members.
“After a few school board meetings and trying to meet with these people, we realized, ‘Oh, the majority of our school board doesn’t want anything to do with what our concerns are and they don’t want to give us a seat,’” Shaw said.
So the parents reached out to legislators and state and local agencies, but found officials pointing fingers at one another.
“And then that’s when the Republican Party heard us,” Shaw said. “They reached out.”
The parents learned there were two school board seats open in the November 2022 election — more than enough to swing the school board majority back to its historically conservative direction.
Shaw got a boost from the pastor of the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills megachurch, who has historically promoted candidates from the stage. Church members have sat on the Chino Valley board since at least 2008.
“Jack Hibbs scooped her up early on,” said Kristi Hirst, a Chino parent who supported the pandemic-era restrictions and clashed with Shaw’s parent group. “He pulled her up on stage and endorsed her.”
Shaw said her family stopped attending the church in 2025.
In the election, Shaw won 51.58% of the vote, beating the school board president. A month later, the new board majority made her president.
Shaw had gone from being a thorn in the board’s side to leading it.
Shaw wants schools to get back to basics
“I’ve always liked the public school system,” Shaw said. “I don’t like what they’re doing to it now.”
She’d like to see a renewed focus on the basics in California.
“We have, on average, $150 billion spent a year and the average is, what, 47% can read at grade level?” Shaw said, “I see what’s being legislated as far as ideology, the LGBT stuff in the classroom.”
In 2011, the FAIR Education Act required LGBTQ history be taught in California public schools and prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
Schools “should be focusing on reading, writing and math — ideologies kept at home,” Shaw said.
She wants to follow in the footsteps of Mississippi. The state has seen a sharp increase in the rate of elementary school students reading at grade level, though these improvements appear to vanish by eighth grade. The progress follows increased spending on teacher training and a policy of holding back students in third grade if they don’t meet reading standards.
“We can do that with the money that we have here if we just focus on education,” Shaw said.
Shaw also wants more technical career education and more students flowing into the state’s community college system.
“I just feel like we’ve done a very bad job setting up this generation when we have a lot of money and a lot of tools that could be utilized without the divisive things that are being legislated or pushed in the school system,” she said.
It’s not Shaw’s views on improved fourth-grade reading scores that make her controversial.
The pandemic-era rallying cry of “parents’ rights” — to have kids unvaccinated, unmasked and in school — returned. This time, it was an argument in favor of letting parents know if their students requested to change their name or pronouns or wanted access to facilities or sports programs that do not align with the gender on their birth certificates.
Assembly Bill 1266, signed in 2013, requires public schools to treat students as the gender they identify as, rather than the one on their birth certificate.
“Why are we continuing to say that students have a right to privacy from their parents? That’s weird,” Shaw said. “Why does the state get to know?”
According to Equality California, the state’s largest LGBT advocacy group, outing young people against their will to parents — who may not be supportive — puts some in danger.
The Chino Valley school board has long opposed transgender athletes playing girls’ sports. The Shaw-led board has returned to the issue, filing federal complaints against the state for its transgender student policies.
She’s gone further than that. Shaw traveled around the state to protest outside track meets where transgender athlete and recent Jurupa Valley High School graduate AB Hernandez was competing.
“Her aggression at sports events where we’re trying to support our children … it’s all red flags,” AB’s mother, Nereyda “Nena” Hernandez, said. “Why are we giving someone like that more power? She’s not looking for the best interest of anybody’s children.”
Shaw’s school board also banned from classrooms all flags other than United States, California and military flags. The move has been criticized as a thinly veiled attack on the LGBTQ community aimed at barring LGBTQ and transgender flags.
Shaw’s leadership has been a “disaster,” said Greathouse, with the board spending its time on hot-button political issues, some of which have dragged the district into court. That’s a sign of what’s to come if Shaw becomes state superintendent, she said.
“We will be spending all of our time on right-wing politics instead of actually addressing the needs and much needed improvements that’s absolutely imperative for our districts all over the state,” Greathouse said.
Yet Shaw is seen as a leader by other conservative Inland Empire school board members.
Shaw is a “frontrunner in a lot of ways,” Temecula Valley Unified School District board member Jen Wiersma said. Taking cues from Shaw’s board, Wiersma pushed for Temecula Valley Unified to put in place a parental notification policy and flag ban, though both policies ended up being rescinded.
“It’s easy to go after her for believing in her conservative values and principles, but really she’s for every student,” Wiersma said.
In the Redlands Unified School District, school trustee Olson pushed her board to approve a parental notification policy, flag ban, book ban and a resolution calling on the California Interscholastic Federation to ban transgender athletes from girl’s sports.
“Sonja Shaw led the way as Chino Valley championed parental notification,” Olson said. “She was brave enough to stand for what is morally right.”
Shaw said she’s “open to conversations” with people who disagree with her.
“I’m like, ‘Where can we meet? Where can we see eye-to-eye?’ I’ve always offered that,” she said. “I used to beg Tony Thurmond to meet with us.”
Shaw made national headlines in 2023 when she expelled Thurmond, the current State Superintendent of Public Instruction, from a school board meeting where the Chino Valley board approved its parental notification policy.
Can Shaw make history and win?
History suggests she’s facing an uphill battle.
No Republican has been elected to statewide office in California since Arnold Schwarzenegger was reelected governor in 2006.
“The odds are against Shaw,” Jack Pitney, a professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College wrote in an email. “California is a deep-blue state, and the 2026 midterm is likely to be rough on Republican candidates nationwide. Nominally, the race is nonpartisan, but voters tend not to see it that way.”
The last GOP candidate to win the top schools job was Max Rafferty, who was elected to two terms in 1962 and 1966.
“Shaw was the leading vote-getter” in the June 2 primary, Marcia Godwin, professor of Public Administration at the University of La Verne wrote in an email, “but she and the other Republican in the race together received only about one-quarter of the votes.”
Shaw’s campaign has raised nearly $469,000, according to the latest campaign finance filings. That includes a $12,340 donation in May from the Yuba County Republican Party.
Shaw’s opponent, Barrera, is a Democrat supported by the powerful California Teachers Association. No candidate for state superintendent has won without the CTA’s endorsement since 1982.
Shaw predicts her back-to-basics message will resonate with voters.
“Reading, writing, math, pathways to success, making sure parents are involved,” she said.
Most Californians share her views, Shaw said.
“I’ve been on the right side of the 80/20 issues,” where 80% of the population agrees with her stances, including parental notification politics and no transgender girls in girls’ sports, she said.
Whatever happens in November, Shaw won’t be on the Chino Valley school board next year. In late July, she ended her bid for a second term. Instead, her husband Chris Shaw is running for her seat.
Meanwhile, the state superintendent’s role has changed since Shaw began her run.
In June’s state budget deal, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic legislative leaders included a provision stripping the position of most of its power.
Starting Jan. 15, 2027, a director of education appointed by the governor will run the state’s K-12 education system. The superintendent will instead be a voting member of the State Board of Education, the California Community Colleges board of governors, be a Cal State University trustee and a University of California regent.
According to Newsom, the change will streamline California’s K-12 education system.
“They’re only doing it because they know we have a chance to get that seat,” Shaw said, ahead of the budget deal being signed. “They wouldn’t be doing it now after all these decades (otherwise).”
Wiersma said Sacramento was scared of Shaw’s candidacy and how she threatened to “challenge the system.”
“You know, she’s not going to stop,” Wiersma said. “I see great things for the future.”
In the revised superintendent’s role, Shaw intends to pivot back to how she started in politics: being a thorn in the education system’s side.
“I would be the biggest, baddest pain in their butt,” she said, “because they would not be able to hide from the failures and the things that they’re doing in education that parents don’t even know.”
Staff writer Allyson Vergara contributed to this report.