OC Board of Education approves 4 OCCA countywide charters. One of these OCCA charter schools will be in PYLUSD. 

Read the OC Register article here.

Read the OCCA petition here. 

The Orange County Classical Academy is an idea pushed by partners Jeff Barke and Mark Bucher, neither of whom have the experience to launch a successful charter school nor have school-aged children. OCCA uses curriculum from Hillsdale College, a private Christian college funded by the DeVos family. One of Barke's children graduated from Hillsdale College. Hillsdale College's 12th president, Larry Arnn, was the chair of Trump's "1776 Commission," which released a curriculum that historians have called "a hack job" and "full of lies."

Jeff Barke is a family medicine concierge physician with out-patient-only privileges at Hoag. He was recruited by the Trump campaign to attack public health experts like Dr. Fauci, the director of the CDC, and the Surgeon General. He is a member of the OC Republican Central Committee. He is a member of the Lincoln Club which funds "R" candidates. He was previously elected to the Los Alamitos Unified School Board of Education where he routinely denied climate change and pushed creationism. 

According to the OCCA's petition for four countywide charters from November 2021, the board now consists of Jeff Barke, President, Jean Judge, Treasurer, Stefan Bean, Secretary, M. Andrew Moshier, and Bishop Gale Oliver. Judge is an attorney and contributor to the Federalist; Bean is an area superintendent for Aspire Public Schools, and Bishop Gale Oliver, Jr.,  pastor of Greater Light Family Church, former candidate for Santa Ana City Council.

Mari Barke, wife of Jeff, ran for OCBOE, District 2, in 2018. Her campaign was run by Charter Public Schools (CPS PAC) and California Policy Center (CPA: CEO is her husband's OCCA partner, Bucher). Prior to this, Barke had never been elected to public office. She received more than $424,00 in donations to her campaign (the most ever spent on an OCBOE race). She received $245,706 from CPS PAC. Various contributions made to her campaign went to Axiom Stratagies, CPS PAC's political consultant. Barke made payments to CEO Consulting and Bieber Communications, as well as the Lincoln Club, for which her husband picks candidates to support. After winning her seat, she became an executive at the California Policy Center.

Mark Bucher is an OC attorney with a long history of political controversies, many involving Orange USD. He is the CEO of the California Policy Center (CPC). The CPC is an anti-teachers union and pro-charter organization that is connected to the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella organization for a consortium of conservative and libertarian think thanks. It is closely affiliated with the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Americans for Prosperty. Along with Barke, Bucher is involved in choosing candidates to fund for the OC Lincoln Club. Mark Bucher appears to no longer be on the Board of OCCA.

Despite the fact that the Orange USD staff recommended that the Board deny the proposal for multiple reasons including budget concerns and religious bias (with even the principal of Orange Lutheran HS speaking about his grave concerns over religious bias), the OUSD Board voted 4:3 to approve the charter. Board members Brenda Lebsack and Rick Ledesma had also received large donations from charter schools and the Lincoln Club of OC. 

Larry Arnn, the 12th president of Hillsdale College (in center flanked by the Barkes) was Trump's pick to lead the "1776 Commission" which released a counterpoint to the New York Time's 1619 Project. The commission's curriculum was labeled "a hack job" and "full of lies" by historians. Arnn has also served as trustee of the Heritage Foundation since 2002 and is also a member of the National Policy Network, a consortium of more mainstream traditional conservatives and more far-right extremists, according to the Southern Policy Law Center. 

In the summer of 2020, Blades attended a press conference put on by OCBOE and posted about receiving the four conservative trustees' endorsements.

"Now, into their second academic year, school leaders are looking to expand and have charted a course that could allow them to operate multiple campuses across the county without having to seek or secure approval from individual districts, as is the norm."

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