In July, I wrote that the Laguna Beach Unified School District Board majority (Sheri Morgan, Howard Hills, and Dee Perry) appeared to be taking a loud but peaceful parent protest and recasting it as something more troubling.
I wrote that the First Amendment protects signs, chants, criticism, and public pressure, even when elected officials find them deeply unpleasant. I wrote that the available videos did not show protesters pushing Dee Perry. I questioned why the May 14 rally had migrated from public criticism of the Board into closed session under language involving a “threat to public services or facilities,” followed by lawyers and an outside investigation.
I also laid out what the record already showed: what happened outside Thurston, what happened to Dee, how police responded, what LBUSD did afterward, and why the evidence pointed much more clearly to a crowd-management problem than some larger threat.
LBUSD has now released the outside investigative report it commissioned into May 14.
The central facts held up.
Investigators reviewed surveillance footage and other videos, emails, text messages, policies, and records, and interviewed all five trustees, District administrators, employees, union representatives, and community members. They concluded that the May 14 demonstration was an exercise of First Amendment rights and found no evidence of criminal activity or intent to physically harm Board members, staff, parents, children, or anyone else.
The event remained nonviolent.
That conclusion carries additional weight because this was never presented as merely an after-action review of parking, entrances, and crowd control.
During the May 14 meeting, Board President Sheri Morgan told the audience, “This is a business meeting. This is not a rally. It is illegal to rally on campus.”
Parents gathered outside a public school board meeting to protest elected officials’ actions, and the Board president publicly characterized a rally on campus as illegal.
Then came the June 8 closed session. According to the ACLU’s letter, Sheri said afterward that safety concerns arising from May 14 had led the Board to ask legal counsel or a designee to examine what happened, whether safety protocols had been followed, and whether Board policy or law had been violated. My July article focused heavily on that point.
So yes, the legality of what parents did was among the questions being examined, but now we have the answer.
The rally was protected First Amendment activity. No evidence of criminal conduct. No evidence of an intent to physically harm anyone.
The report also resolves one of the most repeated pieces of the May 14 story: what happened to Dee.
Dee, of course, was visibly shaken and felt intimidated by the crowd. The report takes that seriously, and any fair account should too. Investigators nevertheless found something quite different from what some people made it out to be: protesters did not physically surround, block, or push her.
Their review found that Dee at one point had approximately five feet of space around her and that “no protesters physically approached her.” They found no evidence that people repositioned themselves to create an intentional barrier. Dee turned toward the crowd, lost her balance and stumbled into a parent.
Dee herself told investigators: “It was me; I lost my balance.” Again, she did not fall to the ground.
That is the same sequence I described months ago, based on the publicly available evidence. Dee struggled while entering; Ketta Brown helped her inside; the videos did not show anyone pushing her; and Dee had separately said she was not pushed.
The investigators had more footage, more witnesses, internal District records, and substantially greater access than I did. They arrived at the same factual conclusion.
There is nuance in the report. The Board meeting became loud and, at times, disruptive. People interrupted. Children yelled toward the library. Signs appeared behind the dais. Investigators described portions of the meeting as angry, disrespectful, and difficult to control.
My earlier description of a “loud but peaceful protest” is most precise when applied to the demonstration outside. Inside, some participants crossed into disruption, but no one engaged in violence or criminal conduct.
The more revealing part of the report may be what LBUSD had already accomplished before anyone assigned an external investigator.
On May 19, five days after the rally, District administrators met with Laguna Beach’s city manager, city attorney and the Police Chief. According to the report, law enforcement’s role was clarified: officers would address legitimate public-safety concerns and increase staffing when larger crowds were expected. Still, they would not interfere with First Amendment participation or serve as an enforcement arm of the Board without a legitimate safety concern.
On May 21, Assistant Superintendent Manoj Roychowdhury communicated new security protocols.
By June 3, LBUSD had already implemented or begun implementing changes involving reserved Board parking, directional signage, separate Board access, controlled restroom access, crowd management, and ingress and egress.
May 19. May 21. June 3.
The outside investigation was assigned July 1.
By then, LBUSD had already identified the useful lessons from May 14 and was acting on them. Administrators had met with police and city officials. Security procedures had changed. Access issues were being addressed. The District understood that an unusually large and angry crowd required better planning.
Sheri, Howard, and Dee still commissioned an outside investigation.
The eventual recommendations largely extended work already underway: clearer crowd-management procedures, defined staff responsibilities, improved Board access, consideration of another venue for unusually large meetings, and better coordination with law enforcement.
All reasonable, but also remarkably unsurprising.
Before the investigation was assigned, I had already reviewed the available videos, public statements, Board Majority actions, and applicable First Amendment issues and published a remarkably similar analysis.
I did not have access to every internal record, nor did I interview every trustee. My reporting was not a substitute for a formal independent investigation, and I would never claim otherwise. But the fundamental questions were hardly difficult to answer.
Was the rally illegal? No.
Had protesters pushed Dee down? No.
Was this a violent protest? No.
Were there legitimate crowd-management problems? Yes.
Could LBUSD address them without treating the protest itself as unlawful? Yes.
Was LBUSD already doing exactly that? Its own report now tells us it was.
I assembled the timeline from public records, shared videos, and basic legal research — all of it was free.
LBUSD’s outside investigators arrived later with greater access and public resources behind them and produced a report that substantially confirmed it.
We still do not know what taxpayers paid for that confirmation.
An independent investigation is entirely appropriate in some circumstances, even when journalists, residents, or attorneys have already examined the available facts. But independence does not eliminate the obligation to show what additional public value was produced, particularly when the practical deficiencies had already been identified, and corrective work was underway weeks before the investigation began.
The comparison becomes considerably more uncomfortable when set against the real May 14 story.
Parents were at Thurston Middle School because of decisions the Board majority had made.
On May 12, Sheri, Dee and Howard voted 3-2 to approve Dr. Jason Glass’s separation 10 months into his four-year contract. Joan Malczewski and Jim Kelly voted no. Two days later, Sheri announced Dr. Don Austin as LBUSD’s next permanent superintendent, with no publicly announced superintendent search, recruitment timeline, or identified candidate pool.
Joan later said she had not known Don was a candidate before she was presented with the motion to appoint him.
Those circumstances are why I have spent months asking a fairly basic question: how did a permanent successor emerge 48 hours after the Board approved Glass’s separation?
That part of the May 12 and May 14 record remains unfinished.
On August 13, Senior Deputy District Attorney Avery Harrison of the Orange County District Attorney’s Special Prosecutions Unit submitted a California Public Records Act request seeking records surrounding both Glass’s separation and Austin’s hiring.
The DA requested communications concerning Glass’s separation agreement and departure date, along with records concerning Austin’s availability, possible start dates, salary and benefits discussions, proposed employment contracts, and authorization or discussion of Don as a candidate. The request also seeks records of interviews or conversations with Austin through May 14 and communications and drafts surrounding the May 14 press release announcing his hiring.
A records request from the District Attorney’s Office is not a finding that anyone violated the Brown Act or committed wrongdoing, but it matters because of the timeline the DA wants documented.
When did discussions with Don begin? Who participated? When was he being discussed as a candidate? When did compensation and contract discussions occur? When was the May 14 announcement prepared?
I look forward to seeing the records, because something about the order of events here is troubling.
Parents objected to decisions made by their elected School Board. They showed up, made signs, brought their children, chanted, and shamed the people who held those offices. Sheri publicly questioned the rally’s legality. The Board subsequently took the protest into a closed-session discussion involving threats to public services or facilities and authorized legal counsel or a designee to examine whether those parents had violated policy or law.
LBUSD then used taxpayer money to investigate them.
Parents should be able to criticize their government without wondering whether their government will respond by putting their conduct under legal investigation.
Sheri and Howard are not on the ballot this November, but Dee is. She is seeking another term on the Laguna Beach Unified School District Board.
The report is finished. The record is public. Now voters must judge the results.
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