A high school teacher in Santa Ana, California, is speaking out after she and hundreds of other educators were laid off earlier this month amidst the city’s budgetary struggles. However, the surrounding circumstances have left some suspicious that her firing was politically motivated.
Teacher Noelle Carney Campbell is an 8th-grade U.S. history teacher in Santa Ana, a heavily Latino city with lower incomes than the rest of California’s Orange County, which includes some of the wealthiest enclaves in the country.
After months of rumors of sweeping cuts to educational staff, Carney Campbell recently posted the shocking news that she and more than 100 of her teaching colleagues received: They were being laid off amid a crisis in Santa Ana of declining enrollment and massive budget shortfalls.
Carney Campbell’s firing is a curious case, however. Not only was she named Teacher of the Year last year, but she is also tenured — and the sole U.S. History teacher in the high school she works at, for that matter.
In short, Carney Campbell should have been toward the bottom of the list of priorities for cuts, especially since some 600 teachers were hired after her. Yet she has landed among those who have been notified their contracts will not be renewed at the end of this school year.
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At first blush, it would seem Carney Campbell has been swept up in an ongoing crisis in Santa Ana. The school district has seen steadily declining enrollment that has been blamed on several factors, including declining birth rates and soaring cost of living.
Many of those laid off were hired during a different crisis — the 2020 pandemic, when the combination of a teacher shortage and large amounts of state and federal relief money saw a wave of hiring in Santa Ana. That funding has now expired, however, creating an untenable budgetary shortfall.
But there has been widespread anger over solving this problem by firing teachers. Not only have none of the administrators who mishandled the funding been put on the chopping block, but the district’s superintendent, Jerry Almendarez, was approved for a 3% raise on his six-figure salary.
Carney Campbell called this out in a recent speech given at a protest against the cuts, and she’s not alone in her anger. Back in December, even Santa Ana Mayor Valeria Amezcua angrily criticized the move in a post on Facebook. “The board can give the Superintendent a raise and turn around and lay off teachers and counselors… smh,” she wrote, going on to criticize the school board for mismanaging its budget and pandemic-era funding. Almendarez has since announced his resignation amid the uproar.
In response to Carney Campbell’s viral videos detailing her and her colleagues’ layoffs, many viewers were quick to blame the situation on the new President and his stated goals to significantly dismantle the Department of Education. Santa Ana’s problems predate Donald Trump, however. Regardless, the fingerprints of political divides seem to be all over Santa Ana schools’ drama.
In a statement to local media outlet OC IndependentMayor Amezcua and School Board Member Jorge Valdes explained Santa Ana’s declining enrollment in explicitly culture-war terms, blaming it on “an excessive focus on ethnic studies” and initiatives that focus on “divisive” topics like the Indigenous history of the Santa Ana area.
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Likewise, school board member Brenda Lebsack told Voice of OC that declining enrollment is due to “political influence” over students in classrooms that has “betrayed parents’ trust.” Lebsack ran for and won her seat in 2024 on a conservative platform that included anti-trans hysteria and other right-wing obsessions.
Nevertheless, even Lebsack said she disagrees with the layoffs. The sole board member to vote against them, she told Voice of OC she disagreed with the fact that the cuts focus almost solely on teachers and counselors but not on management or services.
Santa Ana’s problems are obviously complicated, but it’s hard not to hear the political dog whistles in officials’ statements — which essentially amount to blaming Santa Ana schools’ issues on “woke” politics rather than the very obvious budgetary mismanagement on the part of its administrators.
It is likewise hard not to notice how little Carney Campbell’s outspoken activism aligns with this particular political bent. She is the mandated faculty leader of her school’s Gay/Straight Alliance, for example. Taken together with her accolades, tenure, and seniority, it makes her inclusion on the list of fired teachers seem rather suspiciously political.
For her part, however, Carney Campbell seems wholly uninterested in political arguments. Her focus is on her community, students, and colleagues. In an interview with local news outlet FOX11 in the wake of Santa Ana’s most recent school board meeting, Carney Campbell said cutting services in the county’s most economically disadvantaged school district is counterproductive.
And she is certainly not alone. The district’s most recent school board meeting had an overflow crowd of parents and teachers furious about the layoffs. Carney Campbell and her colleagues have also started a petition demanding Santa Ana schools address their budget shortfalls without layoffs that result in “increasing class sizes, reducing access to vital support services, and destabilizing our schools.”
Whatever the outcome, what seems certain is that the leadership in Santa Ana’s schools and California’s state capital are deeply misguided in a way that seems to be contagious in our country at the moment. As Campbell herself put it, “We cannot be dismantling education. We cannot make this country dumb again.”
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
