The Calls Are Coming From Inside the....

...Cult

Hey there, my ‘boys,’ and in some cases, my ‘gals,’ I hope you’re keeping cool this summer!

Things always kind of slow down in Arizona in the summertime. The legislative session is over, and many people in the local political scene in AZ can breathe a sigh of relief. Other governing bodies still meet over the summer months, including school boards, but typically, the agendas are light, and the meetings are short. 

Not so in Peoria (PUSD), Secular FAM! Their summer meetings have stretched to five or six hours. I mean, sure, they’re not eight or nine hours like they are during the school year now with President Rooks holding the gavel, but six hour meetings tend to be an indicator of poor leadership.

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Since these meetings are so poorly planned and managed, I decided to take a look at the PUSD school board members’ digital footprint to see what their professional backgrounds are. Usually, the best place to check out someone’s resume is on LinkedIn, so that’s where I went first. 

Surprisingly, the PUSD school board members have very sparse LinkedIn profiles, and Board Member Proudfit appears not to have one at all. However, she is no stranger to social media, and she has many other platforms where her professional experience is highlighted. According to her campaign website, she is a podcast host, life coach, part-time teacher, and business consultant. 

Board Members Bowles, Ewing, and Tobey seem to have pretty new LinkedIn profiles, and President Rooks’s profile shows zero work history outside of parenthood at all. 

Clerk Tobey has experience in law enforcement, and Board Members Bowles and Ewing have experience in education. According to her bio on the PUSD website, President Rooks studied education for three years at a local community college, but it’s difficult to tell if she has any real-world work experience. And since the meetings are anywhere from 4-9 hours long since she’s taken the lead, I’m guessing she doesn’t have a lot of experience in professional settings. Though for all I know, mind-numbingly long meetings with circular discussions may be a strategy of the MAGA cult. 

I decided to attend the July 9, 2025 meeting in-person, and was immediately reminded that President Rooks has decided to change the seating chart on the dais, relegating PUSD Superintendent KC Somers to a table off to the side. President Rooks gave no justification for this decision, but given that she’s now seated where Dr. Somers once sat, it comes across as if she wants to be seen as the superintendent. 

Most organizations value collaboration, but based on this seating choice (well, and like, a WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER decisions), one can only conclude that President Rooks does not. Much like her cult leader, she sees herself as the Queen of PUSD, and her followers treat her as such.

Seeing yourself as separate, much less as some kind of monarch when you serve on a school board is a huge red flag. Anyone who knows anything about school boards understands that elected and appointed school board members are part of a governing BODY that works in collaboration with the administrators, families, and staff. The configuration of the seating chart and the overall tone of these meetings give off “Mean Girl” vibes with President Rooks in the role of antagonist, Regina George. Though seriously, these people seem to enjoy being the antagonist.

The best school board members lead with their most vulnerable students in mind, but in PUSD, it seems this board leads with their most privileged parents in mind. I mean, during the past few meetings, a couple of them have insinuated that poor kids in the district are getting special treatment because of Title I funding. I guess that’s why they seem to be AOK that their cult leader is doing away with the Department of Education. 

TACOTUS’s Bloated, Barbaric, and Bleak bill has passed both chambers, and it includes a federal tax program that supports school vouchers with an individual taxpayer refund of $1700. Additionally, SCOTUS has given the green light to dismantle the Department of Education (DOE), so pretty soon here, any additional funding for Title I (schools with high poverty rates) or any federal funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA) could go away. 

I really don’t understand how President Rooks, the mother of a child with special needs, or a special education teacher like Board Member Bowles supports the removal of this funding, and to be honest, I’m not sure if they understand it either. At this point, I can only assume that they’re so far into the cult that the reason they stepped up to serve in the first place is but a faint memory. 

Not only do they not understand how anything works, they don't want to understand how anything works. Their entire existence and ideology is grounded in their ignorance and their unquestioning obedience to existing power structures. It goes along with their religiosity because of their blind faith and adherence to patriarchal structures no matter what. In their mind, questioning anything is bad. 

How on earth can that be good for a school district and the students in it?

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During this meeting, the nonbinary teacher who sued the district spoke to the board about their lawsuit and called out President Rooks and PUSD saying, 

“I was publicly attacked by board members of this district, and while that rhetoric caused deep harm, what cut just as deeply was the district’s silence. Not once did district leadership speak up to correct the record, to offer support, or to affirm that teachers like me belong in the classroom. That silence wasn’t neutral. It was permission.”

They also announced that they have founded a new nonprofit called The Family Prism Project, so show them some love if you’re so moved. 

Right after getting elected in 2022, Heather Rooks wasted no time in bringing litigation to the district she’s supposed to be serving by targeting a nonbinary teacher in the district. She has some wild thoughts about human sexuality and gender identity that are grounded in misinformation, and she loves sharing them with anyone who will listen. 

She even participated in a “training” asserting that public school teachers are “transing” our kids. She has a pretty low opinion of teachers and teachers unions; one just needs to glance at her Xitter page to see how little she thinks of us. 

And while she has no trouble throwing out false accusations about the LGBTQ+ community and teachers on her social media channels and online appearances, she sure is radio silent about the very real abuse perpetrated by her cult leader who was known to be a frequent flier on the Lolita Express. 

You’ll have to forgive me if I think this “concern” about the safety of children coming from cultists like this is total bullshit. Felon 45/47 bragged about being a sexual assaulter during his first presidential campaign in 2016.

He also objectifies his own daughter.  Countless women have accused him of being a sexual predator. In 2023, a jury held him liable for rape. Now, suddenly the Epstein list is just *POOF* GONE??? C’mon, man. 

Interestingly, there are some in the MAGAverse who seem to have stopped drinking the KookKool-Aid over this breach of justice, 

but others continue to push the cult’s narrative that only serves to protect the rich and powerful while demonizing the poor and marginalized. 

Because so many of these cultists do not know how anything works, they end up aligning with and protecting those who aim to do them and their children the most harm. Earlier this year, President Rooks was Big Mad over Rep David Livingston (R-LD28) because he wanted to cut funding for people with disabilities. But she also supports MAGA at the national level, and that big, beastly bill will cut billions of dollars in funding for Medicaid while adding to the national debt. 

Also, did y’all know that the biggest cuts found in that bill won’t go into effect until 2027, after the 2026 primaries? They’re really counting on us all to be ignorant and forgetful idiots. 

President Rooks refers to the special needs of her own child regularly, but then supports an administration that wants to do away with the DOE - the agency that ensures that funding for special needs students is allocated appropriately. 

During this same meeting, the people at the meeting who (I can only assume) voted for an accused sexual assaulter, 34-count convicted felon, Epstein File Existance Denier, and adjudicated rapist decided to no longer partner with one of the transportation vendors in their district because they were worried about *checks notes* child safety.

Members of this board also seem to be under the impression that free market capitalism isn’t a thing, and that they can dictate how anyone who does business with them runs their own businesses. Remember, this is a board with a majority that frequently ignores tried and true best practices in favor of bigoted, xenophobic, and authoritarian ideology. 

You may recall that a few meetings ago, the cult members on this board tried to dictate the organizational policies and practices of the Greater Phoenix Chamber’s Foundation. Even though they demand that vendors sign an attestation that they will not bring any programming that values things like equity, inclusive practices, or diversity. And in some cases, even that isn’t enough for them. 

From what I can gather, the majority of board members in PUSD want to micromanage the business practices of their OWN organization AND EVERY OTHER ORGANIZATION THEY DO BUSINESS WITH. I’m sure this will go over really well with the local business community. Business owners totally love jumping through a billion hoops and putting up with arbitrary mandates from government officials.

During the vote to approve vendors, four members of the PUSD board voted to table a vote for a network security company called “Global Solutions” after asserting that their website is filled with references to DEI. But then it was discovered that there are SEVERAL companies with that same name, and their Google searches were pulling up several organizations with the same name (again - is THIS who we want in charge of education in PUSD? People who can’t conduct a simple Google search? Who can’t tell the difference between reliable and unreliable sources?). 

Board Member Bowles also complained about the approved newspaper vendors, saying she’d like “more conservative newspapers,” but the administrator explained that that partnership was for public meeting postings, as required by law. 👀

This board also voted to remove another vendor from its list, Highground, Inc., a local lobbying and public relations firm, that provides public opinion research services to PUSD. The only reason given for this removal came from President Rooks who said she “has some concerns” and then gave no example of said concerns. 

In past meetings, DEI and “woke” ideologies were cited as factors for severing and/or rejecting contracts, so I decided to take a look at Highground’s website and client list. There is no mention of DEI, CRT, SEL, or anything else and the client list is about as vanilla as you can get. In fact, informally, many people I spoke with consider Highground Inc. to be moderate and even “right-leaning” as far as lobbying firms go. 

I struggled to see what President Rooks’s “concerns” are, but then I noticed that they represent the Arizona School Board Association (ASBA). You may recall that PUSD recently cut ties with ASBA, so perhaps it’s because of that? Either way, the sole justification for severing ties with a local business of “having some concerns” deserved waaaaay more pushback from her colleagues than it received. Given that Board Member Proudfit is a self-proclaimed “business consultant” I’d kind of hope she’d advocate for the business community more. 

Instead, the pro-business board members essentially shat all over local businesses with the lone dissenting vote coming from Board Member Melissa Ewing, who shared concerns that her colleagues really need to stay in their lane. 

Local businesses and business leaders donate an awful lot to school board campaigns, so I sure hope that the folks at Global Solutions, Inc. and Highground Inc. are paying attention to these misguided, misinformed, kneejerk decisions. 

In teantime, Felon 47 is posting unhinged rants about Epstein and how he tOtAlLy iSn’T oN tHe EpStEiN LiSt, gUyZ! He’s so desperate for everyone to move on from whatever is in those files that he’s even willing to disparage his base, essentially calling them stupid. 

Even Mike “I monitor my son’s porn consumption” Johnson is breaking from other cult members on this issue and demanding the release of the Epstein files. And it seems that already, the most rabid defenders of his regime are done drinking the Kool-Aid. 

Given that Clerk Tobey claims to care so much about the law and student safety, I’m sure he’ll rescind his support of the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist prez any day now. 

Quite frankly, until any of these evangelical extremist school board members across the state and country demand that the Epstein Files are released, I’m just going to go ahead and assume that they don’t really care about the safety and wellbeing of the students and families they serve. 

One thing I know is that if you’re reading this, you DO care about the wellbeing of your community. Secular AZ does too, but we can’t combat evangelical extremism in local government without your help. Please support the work we do today, and if you haven’t already, please upgrade to a paid subscription to this Substack. 

Stay woke, Secular FAM!