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The contentious campaign and special recall election for two out of the three trustees on the Sunol Glen Unified School District’s board culminated on Tuesday, with preliminary results as of Election Night seeing a majority of ballots counted in favor of removing Ryan Jergensen and Linda Hurley from the board.
According to the initial count released after 8 p.m. Tuesday evening, 55.08% of voters were in favor of recalling Jergensen with 54.14% in favor of recalling Hurley.
But although the early, unverified results might point towards a safe majority in some elections, 10% is only about 40 voters in this special election open only to residents of the small, single-school district’s boundaries, which consists of a total of 828 registered voters.
According to updated results released at 8:40 p.m. Tuesday, the margin was shrinking slightly, with 54.31% of votes in favor for recalling Jergensen and 53.23% in favor of recalling Hurley after 41 ballots cast on Election Day were counted.
Of the 828 registered voters in the district, updated Election Night results saw a turnout of 56.16%, or 465 ballots counted as of the first update, with an additional eight ballots having been counted as of 9:01 p.m.
As of the latest results, 53.81% of ballots counted were in favor of recalling Jergensen, with 52.75% in favor of recalling Hurley.
Hurley is already nearing the end of the two-year special term she was elected to in 2022, which expires after the upcoming November general election, while Jergensen was elected to a four-year term in 2022 having first been appointed to the board earlier that year. The third trustee, Peter (Ted) Romo, is set to remain in office through 2026.
Hurley started to come under fire shortly after being sworn-in as trustee following comments she made as a member of the public at a Feb. 21 board meeting at the neighboring San Ramon Valley Unified School District during a debate on the young adult graphic novel “Gender Queer” by Bay Area author and cartoonist Maia Kobabe. Hurley and a number of other commenters called the book “pornography,” while others rallied against censorship of textbooks and library materials at public schools.
In April 2023, Romo introduced a resolution to provide guidelines on how elected trustees at Sunol Glen are allowed to conduct themselves in public, which failed to pass on the three-member board.
It wasn’t until September that tensions at the district ramped up, with both Jergensen and Hurley – a majority on the three-member board – voting in favor of a resolution banning the display of flags other than the U.S. and California flag in the district, which consists of a single elementary school with one flag pole. The incident and ensuing backlash from it garnered widespread local and national media attention, as well as the recall measure set to be decided by Tuesday’s special election.
