The 2024 School Board election did more than change two names on the dais. It also changed the people and organizations surrounding Laguna Beach Unified and, in some ways, the terms of the conversation itself.
Sensible Laguna became a key voice around the District’s facilities plans and pushed for a different approach to LBUSD governance. Sheri Morgan and Howard Hills won in 2024 and joined Dee Perry to form a new Board majority. Families United for Education in Laguna (FUEL) formed afterward when a group of current LBUSD parents, concerned about that majority’s direction, decided they needed an organized voice.
Two years later, both groups stay deeply involved. People who wanted change in 2024 now defend much of what it produced, while parents who organized afterward support candidates in 2026 seeking to change direction again. Around them are websites, letters to the editor, civic organizations, campaign supporters, and anonymous publications building a wider discussion of Laguna’s schools.
I started looking at these groups because many questions surround them, and the same words keep appearing in almost every LBUSD debate: students, transparency, accountability, and civility. I wanted to understand who is behind these organizations, what brought them into the District conversation, what they support, and how closely their public records match the standards they demand.
I also want to be clear about my perspective. As a current parent, I have often found FUEL’s approach to governance more closely aligned with the concerns I see and experience in the schools. I am not a member of FUEL. I have never tried to hide that, and it is why I think the records themselves should do most of the work here.
These are public schools supported by the community: retirees, grandparents, former parents, and residents without children all have reason to care. Where people come from helps explain the perspective they bring when they speak for students or make broad claims about what our schools need.
Sensible Laguna’s origin is fairly easy to trace. Its three founders are Gary Kasik, Steve Brown, and Steve McIntosh. Gary and Brown aired concerns about LBUSD’s Facilities Master Plan by spring 2023. That June, Village Laguna hosted all three founders for a presentation about the proposed expansion around Laguna Beach High School and the District Office. By fall, they appeared in City discussions and pushed for greater review and City involvement.
All three live in the area affected by the high school and pool proposals, making their initial interest understandable. A large construction project near a home naturally invites questions about traffic, noise, parking, scale, and neighborhood impacts.
Some of that advocacy was effective. The parking garage disappeared, the pool was reduced, and the plans changed. The underlying facilities needs remained, however, and the District is still replacing the pool. The current Board’s 2026 facilities work has also produced a substantial list of capital and maintenance needs throughout LBUSD.
The argument soon expanded well beyond facilities.
Sensible’s founders organized around a development proposal affecting their neighborhood, and over time their advocacy moved into District spending, administrators, academic performance, teachers, governance, and who should sit on the School Board. Much of Sensible Laguna’s material from before December 2024 is no longer on its current website, so I have been reconstructing that period through screenshots, saved copies, and republished material.
Those older posts make the progression clear. Gary wrote about an “entrenched” School Board and said new members were needed so the Board would listen. Sensible circulated urgent notices encouraging people to attend facilities meetings and warning about traffic, noise, neighborhood impacts, and spending. By the 2024 election, changing the Board was already part of its message.
Village Laguna gave Sensible’s founders an early platform and later hosted a School Board candidate forum. It did not formally endorse candidates in that race, although it later acknowledged that the facilities controversy had spilled into the election.
Sheri and Howard ultimately joined Dee to form the new Board majority, and Sensible remained deeply involved after the change it had been supporting.
Sensible’s role also changed after the Board did.
Today, Sensible Laguna describes itself as a broad coalition of residents and taxpayers focused on transparency, fiscal responsibility, and careful analysis of District spending and statistics. It says its information reaches more than 2,000 residents and taxpayers. Its publicly identified leadership is still Gary Kasik, Steve Brown, and Steve McIntosh, three retired men with backgrounds in finance, technology, operations, and business.
Brown and Kasik have no children in LBUSD. McIntosh is the only founder with a documented LBUSD parent connection, and none of the three currently has a child enrolled in the District. Their backgrounds do not diminish their stake in public schools but help explain an approach anchored heavily in taxpayer value, facilities, management, employee costs, and Board authority.
Students appear frequently in Sensible Laguna’s writing, although there is a noticeable pattern in how they appear.
Often, students are part of an argument that someone else is failing them. Administrators are mismanaging the District, teachers or curriculum are not producing strong results, or the former Board lacked oversight. In other cases, students appear in spending arguments, with money proposed for the pool or another facilities expense presented as funds that could instead go to STEM, arts, academics, or other student priorities.
The pool funding worked differently from that framing. LBUSD had accumulated capital reserves over years for major facilities needs, and the project was planned from those reserves rather than cuts to ongoing classroom staffing or student-program budgets. There was still a legitimate debate over the project’s size, how much of those reserves to commit, and what other capital projects should compete for the same money. But every dollar saved on the pool was not automatically a dollar that would have gone to teachers, classroom programs, or ongoing student services.
Gary has repeatedly framed pool savings as money that could benefit students elsewhere. What I found harder to find was advocacy that began with a student need and stayed focused on addressing it without becoming an argument against another District expenditure, employee, administrator, or prior Board member.
Sensible uses “students” frequently to describe what it believes the District should do. I cannot tell what its founders privately care about, but I can look at the issues they raise and how they use students in those arguments.
Steve McIntosh’s writing makes Sensible Laguna’s approach especially clear. Before the 2024 election, he was already using academic data to argue that Laguna’s schools were underperforming and that District leadership needed to change. In one article about special education, he began with a student’s experience and quickly widened it into an attack on then-Superintendent Jason Viloria, whom he called a “Mafia boss,” before closing with a call to “can Viloria” and change the Board.
A parent also wrote to District leadership at the time, expressing concern about Steve discussing a student whose family was uncomfortable with how the child had been brought into the debate. I do not want to revisit that family’s circumstances here, but concerns about how students were being used in this advocacy were being raised before FUEL existed.
Steve has also repeatedly cited high-school math results as evidence of wider District failure. Those scores deserve scrutiny, but California’s “met” and “exceeded” standards are not pass/fail grades, and students below “met standard” are not automatically failing math. Using those categories as pass/fail overstates what the assessment actually reports, especially from an organization that places considerable emphasis on careful use of data.
His interactions with the school community are also relevant because Steve now writes frequently about toxicity, intimidation, and what adults model for students. At one School Board meeting, he used profanity toward students, after which the District restored the recording with the language bleeped. An LBUSD educator described an interaction with Steve after a Main Beach rally as aggressive and filed a complaint. I also received a separate firsthand account from a community member who said Steve swore at him inside the Thurston library, followed him outside, and described the subsequent parking lot encounter as threatening.
These accounts involve different people and settings. Steve is one of Sensible Laguna’s three founders and one of its most visible writers, so his own conduct belongs in the same record when the organization criticizes others over civility and behavior.
After the election, Sensible increasingly defended the majority Sheri and Howard formed with Dee and described critics applying phrases such as “disinformation,” “manufactured outrage,” and “political theater.”
It has also become an outside platform for messaging favorable to that majority. This year, Sensible published District-related material the District did not release publicly, including a press release Sheri wanted published. Sensible began as an outside organization pressuring the Board and now regularly defends the majority that replaced it.
Sensible’s own organizational structure appears fairly informal. It publicly identifies Gary, Steve Brown, and Steve McIntosh as its founders, but it does not present a formal membership, governance, or financial structure explaining who funds the advocacy or how decisions are made.
Three residents may be running a website and advocacy effort. Because transparency is central to Sensible’s criticism of LBUSD and other organizations, I wanted to know what readers can see about its operation. Who pays for the website and advocacy? Are there members beyond the founders? Who decides what gets published under the Sensible Laguna name?
I also wish its older material were still available. Sensible was active throughout 2023 and 2024, yet much content from when it pushed for Board change is no longer on the current site. I don’t know why it was removed, but those earlier statements show how the organization’s role changed before and after the election.
FUEL’s story begins after that election.
I know part of its beginning firsthand because I was in an early parent group chat where people asked what they would do about the new Board’s direction. FUEL eventually formed with nine parents on its founding Board. Shaheen Sheik-Sadhal became its first president and stepped away in 2026 to run for School Board, while Emily Rolfing is now president.
FUEL’s leadership includes current LBUSD parent households whose involvement began well before the organization existed. Their backgrounds include PTA, LCAP, WASC, SchoolPower, special education, athletics, youth programs, and other volunteer work. Some are Laguna graduates, most have careers, and their children are still in these schools.
Their long-standing involvement gives them a particular perspective on LBUSD, but it doesn’t make every position FUEL takes correct. These parents were already deeply involved in school committees, volunteer organizations, and student programs well before the 2024 election gave them a reason to organize around governance.
FUEL’s work focuses heavily on Board process, transparency, superintendent independence, staff morale, school quality, and institutional stability. Its IRS determination letter confirms its 501(c)(4) status; it publicly names its Board, and its community has grown to more than 800 people.
A 501(c)(4) does not provide the same public donor disclosure as a campaign committee, which is part of why critics frequently use the phrase “dark money” when describing FUEL. At the same time, the people running the organization have put a great deal of information about themselves into the public record. Their names, careers, school involvement, and positions are public.
The overlap between FUEL families and current or former SchoolPower trustees comes up frequently too. In a four-school District, I am not surprised that many parents willing to spend their evenings organizing around the School Board are the same people who previously spent those evenings on PTA, SchoolPower, LCAP, or other school work. The overlap mostly shows that these families were already highly involved.
Their level of exposure changed considerably when they formed FUEL.
These parents put their names on an advocacy organization with a community of more than 800 people. Their children still attend LBUSD; they have careers and businesses and continue to encounter teachers, administrators, and other families at school events and around town. Once they became publicly involved in the governance fight, their jobs, spouses, volunteer histories, donations, friendships, and motives all became part of the censure focused on them.
Some of that criticism has come anonymously, and at least one parent has been targeted in a way that moved beyond disagreement with her position and into personal disparagement. The anonymous source itself is not particularly important here. The more revealing part is the imbalance between parents attaching their real names, family histories, and reputations to their advocacy and people who can attack those same parents without assuming comparable exposure themselves.
That exposure looks different in a small town because speaking at a Board meeting or putting your name on an advocacy organization does not end when the meeting is over or the article is published. These parents still have children in the schools, still live in the same community, and still encounter the people they disagree with afterward.
There is plenty of room to scrutinize FUEL without treating every fact about the people running it as evidence that their motives are suspect. Its claims can be fact-checked, its organizational structure examined, and its advocacy evaluated against the same public record as everyone else’s. The parents running it chose to participate publicly, and they did so under their own names.
The same words keep getting thrown around in LBUSD debates: students, transparency, accountability, and civility. The records make the differences between these organizations much clearer.
Sensible Laguna grew out of a neighborhood facilities fight, expanded into a wider argument for changing District governance, and became a consistent supporter of the majority that resulted. FUEL grew out of current parents’ reaction to what that new majority began doing, drawing heavily on families already involved throughout the schools.
Those histories do not tell anyone whom to agree with. They do show who is speaking, what brought them into the conversation, and what they tend to advocate for.
When an organization asks the public to trust it on students, transparency, data, or civility, the public record is a fair place to test those claims.
Thank you Erika, the research that goes into these articles is remarkable and quite eye opening. Very telling that Sensible Laguna are trying to scrub the internet of their prior posts and commentary, what are they hiding?
Well written - Thank you!