How one California mom went from questioning school closures to leading a school board and challenging state education policy — and what it cost her along the way.
Seven years ago, Sonja Shaw didn't know what happened at a school board meeting.
She was an art mom, a PE mom, a room mom — not a political activist.
Today, she's president of the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education and a candidate for California state superintendent of public instruction.
What happened in between? Lawsuits. A whistleblower case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly $6 million spent trying to stop her campaign.
And one decision, made quietly, that had nothing to do with any of that — and taught her more about leadership than any of it did.
On this episode of The Family Policy Alliance Report, Shaw joins Craig DeRoche to explain how she got here, what she's learned, and why she believes parents have more influence over public education than most of them realize.
It Started With One Question
When California schools stayed closed well past the point the rest of normal life had reopened, Shaw started asking why.
She eventually moved her own children into an in-person charter school. But she still wanted to understand what was happening inside the district she'd grown up in and graduated from.
She wasn't alone. Other parents were asking the same question, and together they started showing up to school board meetings, hoping someone would listen.
Instead, Shaw says, they were sidelined.
She remembers reaching a breaking point in one meeting: "We're gonna take the whole table," she told the board, after deciding she was done asking for a seat at it.
What started as a search for answers turned into a campaign. Shaw won her seat — and found out getting elected was only the beginning.
A Parental Rights Policy — and a Lawsuit Five Weeks Later
One of Shaw's first priorities as a new board member was a parental notification policy, requiring schools to tell parents if their child began identifying as a different sex at school.
She believed parents had a right to know about something that significant happening to their own kid.
The district was sued within five weeks.
Shaw also describes her role as a whistleblower in Mirabelli v. Olson, a case involving two Escondido-area teachers who challenged a district policy requiring staff to conceal a student's gender transition from their parents.
The legal battle later reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Mirabelli v. Bonta. Family Policy Alliance covered that development in A Big Win for California Parents, featuring California Family Council President Jonathan Keller.
For Shaw, these fights all come back to one question: who gets to make the decisions that shape a child's life — the parent, or the state?
It's the same question at the heart of Family Policy Alliance's Let Parents Parent campaign, which works to defend parents' rights in decisions affecting their children.
The Leadership Decision Nobody Expected
The most revealing part of Shaw's story has nothing to do with a courtroom.
After her board finally won a governing majority, the parents who'd helped elect her wanted the district superintendent gone. Shaw wanted that too, at first.
Instead, she says her faith stopped her.
Rather than push for his removal, she sat down with him and asked a different question: what had he wanted to accomplish that he'd never been supported to do?
That conversation changed everything.
Shaw spent the following year sitting in classrooms and training sessions, learning the job from the inside. The board ended up backing initiatives the same superintendent had tried and failed to move forward for years — with the same person still in the role.
It's the lesson Shaw says she wishes she'd understood before she ever took office: sometimes leadership means listening to the person you were ready to fire, not replacing them.
Why School Board Training Matters
Local school boards make decisions that shape students' daily lives.
Most candidates walk into the job with no background in school law, budgets or board procedure. Shaw says she learned all of it the hard way, in real time, while already in office.
DeRoche notes something worth sitting with: turnout in local school board elections can run as low as 7% or 8%.
A small number of engaged voters — or a single person willing to run — can change who's actually making these decisions.
DeRoche explored the importance of participating in these often-overlooked elections in Why Local Engagement Matters More Than Ever, highlighting why decisions made close to home deserve greater attention.
But showing up is only the beginning. As Shaw learned, serving effectively requires understanding how school boards operate and having the right resources when difficult decisions arise.
That's exactly why Family Policy Alliance created School Board Academy™, the first national school board training program taught from a biblical worldview for pro-family conservatives.
The goal is to equip board members and candidates to honor God, protect children and preserve parents' rights — covering everything from governance and parliamentary procedure to curriculum oversight and model school policies.
The next live, online School Board Academy™ cohort begins October 20!
For a limited time, registration is just $29 (regularly $179) with discount code SBA-OCT26.
If you're serving on a school board or considering a run, this is an opportunity to get biblically based training to help you honor God, protect children and preserve parents' rights.
If you know someone serving on a school board or considering a run, encourage them to explore the training and resources available through School Board Academy.
What Should Schools Be Teaching?
For all the legal battles, Shaw says her actual priorities are simple: reading, writing and math.
She wants struggling students identified and supported before third grade, not quietly passed along without the skills they need.
She also names two more priorities that come up constantly in her work: keeping parents genuinely involved rather than shut out, and protecting girls' privacy and safety in sports and locker rooms.
Her concerns about female students connect to Family Policy Alliance's Save Girls' Sports campaign, which focuses on protecting fairness, safety and opportunities for girls and women in athletics.
But Shaw's larger point is that schools should be places where children learn, parents are respected and students are prepared for the future.
What Happens When Parents Show Up?
Shaw says teachers' unions spent nearly $6 million opposing her campaign for state superintendent.
She finished first in the primary anyway.
But she doesn't measure success only in election results. She points to parents who run for school board, knock on thousands of doors and lose — and still change their community simply by making their neighbors confront an issue they might never have thought about otherwise.
Her story started with a question about why the schools were still closed. It became a case study in what happens when a parent decides not to look away.
What might happen in your own district if more people did the same?
Watch the full conversation, and hear Sonja Shaw talk through the lawsuits, the surprising leadership decision and what she wishes she'd known before running for school board.
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