Table of Contents
Introduction
It’s not every election that a Beverly Hills school board race makes the front page of the Wall Street Journal or gets a deep-dive from LA Material, but this is one of those years. We’ve got vultures circling, coordinated hits flying, and candidates writing $30,000 checks to fight in court for their right to defame and terrorize children. In the words of Board president Judy Manouchehri, the whole affair has become something of a “freak show” (though she would doubtlessly argue that, against all evidence, she did nothing to make it so).
Speaking with Beverly Hills residents, disgust for the tone of this year’s race has become a common refrain. Many have found it exhausting to sift through the muck in search of substance, or to even figure out who took us in our current direction. Although we have already written two substantial articles on this topic (1, 2), to further aid voters going into election weekend, we at BHUSD Watch thought it would be helpful if we provided an easy-to-follow list of four things worth keeping in mind about this year’s board race.
#1:
Judy and David’s Tactics Are Reprehensible
Although it’s both easy and tempting to blame “both sides” for the rancid vibes coming off this year’s board of education race, it’s also inaccurate. Kim Lifschitz and Jackie Kruger have never gone low. Search the landscape for attacks coming from their camps unrelated to Manouchehri’s service on the Board or conduct during the race — you will be hard-pressed to find anything. Comparatively, the intensely personal attacks against Lifschitz and Kruger began before the race even officially kicked off, were immediately co-opted by Manouchehri and Cienfuegos’ networks at the highest levels, and are basically all they ever talk about.
The timeline leaves no room for ambiguity on this front:
Lifschitz announced her candidacy on July 15, 2026, with Kruger’s announcement following on August 6th. Before either one of them could even have their launch parties, Manouchehri’s supporters were already circulating personal attack dossiers against them in neighborhood WhatsApp groups.
Within a week, those dossiers were given to Cienfuegos and Russell Stuart ally Elizabeth Barcohana, who dutifully spun them up into viral threads on Twitter and Instagram that remained pinned to her profile for weeks and promoted to a six-figure audience by Manouchehri’s influencer network.
The following month, the same attack dogs (with whom Manouchehri directly teamed up) re-ran the same play by repeatedly leaking and misrepresenting Lifschitz’s private text messages critical of the Board while also helping Cienfuegos launch a defamation and harassment campaign targeted at Kruger’s child.
Lifschitz and Kruger never hit back. Aside from dispelling the misinformation in these smears and taking steps to protect their families against illegal harassment, they have avoided reciprocal mudslinging to instead focus their campaigns on BHUSD’s underperforming schools and professional mismanagement. They have never gone after their opponents’ families, children, personal lives, or private correspondence. They have not teamed up with partisan political influencers to assassinate Manouchehri and Cienfuegos’s characters. They have not launched pressure campaigns trying to get adverse endorsements rescinded. They have not encouraged social media brigading. They have not started witch hunts over missing seven-dollar lawn signs.
Of course, Lifschitz and Kruger receive no credit for their discipline. According to Manouchehri and her supporters, she has run a perfectly clean campaign yet been subjected to relentless “personal attacks” that nobody can ever seem to locate or otherwise identify the content of. In the language of abuse, we call this DARVO. The irony is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that both Manouchehri supporters interviewed by the Wall Street Journal decrying harassment and misinformation (Ellie Kadz and Donna Tryfman) themselves operate fake Instagram accounts for the purpose of spreading harassment and misinformation.
To be clear, Manouchehri and Cienfuegos had many chances to keep this race clean. At any time, they could have encouraged their supporters to take the high road. Instead, they have done the opposite, even collaborating with social media personalities specifically to spread their venom as far and wide as possible. Take the latest promotional spot for Manouchehri and Cienfuegos’ candidacies from earlier this week by local “influencer” Laura Rahban.
The video is a beat-for-beat repackaging of Barcohana’s early-September Instagram carousel of smears, a tacit concession that they have nothing else to run on. And what is the takeaway of this lecture ostensibly meant to inform viewers about what matters when scrutinizing candidates in a school board election?
Lifschitz and Kruger, both garden-variety Democrats, are “socialists, allegedly.”
Lifschitz has a funny last name, we guess?
Lifschitz joked six years ago that she read a popular book about modern socialist movements to her disabled two-year-old.
Lifschitz’s husband appeared in a news clip criticizing the Board playing with antisemitic tropes, later watched by Hasan Piker.
Lifschitz is against fascism and also against persecuting trans kids.
Lifschitz’s disabled child learned dance steps by watching a ballet performer who is also a drag queen.
Kruger made a mistake in her legal career nearly eight years ago while battling cancer and owned up to it.
Kruger, like one in four Americans, has attended a drag show for entertainment.
Do you feel equipped to determine, based on this information, how Lifschitz and Kruger would approach the legalities of Board governance, prioritize the allocation of district resources, or balance the competing interests of our schools’ various stakeholders? Or has your lizard brain lit up with activation phrases programmed by right-wing agitprop? Have you forgotten that this is supposed to be a non-partisan race? Do you feel sucked into the same MAGAfied black hole of grievance politics that has ruined our national discourse?
One side alone is responsible for that happening in this race. It’s not Lifschitz and Kruger.
The way in which they’ve gone about litigating this race is reason enough not to vote for Manouchehri and Cienfuegos. If we fail to designate their campaign tactics as disqualifying, they will be reused in every local race going forward. Our civic life will be rendered permanently toxic and a target for national rubbernecking.
We are better than that.
#2:
Judy and David Have No Real Plans
One of the most remarkable things about Manouchehri’s reelection campaign is the near-total absence of forward-looking proposals. Her “vision” for BHUSD comes down to a vision board document, and the remainder of her pitch involves simply taking credit for “shepherding” every incremental gain in the district. BHUSD Watch has previously covered why these gains actually reflect a failure to launch compared to what our students are capable of. What has not yet been sufficiently discussed is how Manouchehri bears responsibility for BHUSD’s inability to better keep pace with our neighboring districts.
When Manouchehri joined the Board at the end of 2022, schools nationwide (including BHUSD) were still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, and student outcomes were uniformly suffering. The next two years saw school districts focusing on stabilization as COVID transitioned from pandemic to endemic. What BHUSD needed coming out of this period was continuity, as educational research has established that significant turnover in school district administration creates a "cascading effect," which trickles down from central offices into individual classrooms and measurably hampers student learning. They also needed administrators willing to confront bigotry and harassment within our schools, the propagation of which hurts student outcomes,
What Manouchehri gave us was the opposite. We started with an administrative bloodbath, in total losing our superintendent, four principals, six assistant principals, four assistant superintendents, two executive directors, and athletic director. Those remaining have been subject to intense micromanagement down to the curricular level, while the Board has turned a blind eye to rampant misogyny, racism, bullying, and even sexual assault.
Against this dysfunctional backdrop, it’s little wonder that BHUSD’s post-pandemic “turnaround” has lagged on multiple fronts, forcing the district to cherry-pick gains while ignoring the broader context: BHUSD spends more per student than any district in Los Angeles County. We need not be extending gratitude for Manouchehri’s “shepherding” based on isolated statistical blips that she cannot tie to specific programs or initiatives. The Board has made no attempt to either substantiate a causal effect between their work and the district’s minor gains or explain how they will be maintained beyond “bold leadership decisions” (read: ~*~ vibes ~*~).
In short, Manouchehri is selling happenstance as handiwork.
We can and should expect more from the Board, but all we’ve been promised by Manouchehri and Cienfuegos is pablum and puffery. Indeed, Cienfuegos’ “six pillars” platform may be the most insubstantial offering of the entire race, as he pledges to simply do things BHUSD already does (but ~*~ better ~*~) plus throw money at an equestrian academy so he can play polo closer to home. There are many things genuinely broken within BHUSD in need of fixing, but Manouchehri and Cienfuegos have prescriptions for precisely none of them.
#3:
Jackie and Kim Can Immediately Fix What Judy Broke
At the very beginning of her tenure as Board President, Manouchehri showed us exactly who she was in three moves:
She fulfilled a revenge plot against the most popular trustee on the Board in blatant violation of the law.
She eliminated the ability for parents to attend Board meetings and provide public comment via Zoom.
She moved the in-person public comment period to the end of the Board’s typical four-hour meetings.
In other words: “This is my Board now, I’ll run it how I want, and if you don’t like it, go pound sand.”
Lifschitz and Kruger have pledged to immediately mend the broken trust between the Board and community it represents by reversing Manouchehri’s many adversarial policies that have chilled dissent and stifled creative thinking. They will make it as easy as possible for concerned citizens to bring problems to their attention in a public forum and treat them with respect when they do so (rather than engage in backbiting from the dais, as Manouchehri, Sabag, and Stuart have been routinely doing the entire election cycle). They will stop wasting district funds on frivolous defenses of Manouchehri’s demanded right to break the law when it suits her.
They will also immediately end the culture of fear that Manouchehri instilled among teachers and administrators through her much-touted mass firings, which has deterred those who remain from candidly speaking out about the needs of our students for fear of being seen as a “problem” by Manouchehri’s fickle PR sensibilities. They will unbind our educators’ hands and let them do the work needed for our students to truly flourish. They will stop wasting district dollars on expensive and unnecessary self-promotion (such as the five-figures Manouchehri reportedly spent to print and mass-mail her deceptive BH Insight pamphlets) and let their work speak for itself.
Lastly, Lifschitz and Kruger will put a stop to the political activism that has infected the work of the Board. Unlike Manouchehri and Cienfuegos, they will not owe allegience to a foreign policy agenda advanced by their only institutional backer, one that sees our Board as an incubator for right-wing politicians. They will not owe favors to MAGA politicians, who don’t even live in Beverly Hills, providing all of their social media views. They will not legitimize the use of bomb-throwing partisan influencers to run campaign strategy in a non-partisan race.
This, by itself, sets Lifschitz and Kruger miles apart from the competition. All candidates in the race say they want the best for our students. Only Lifschitz and Kruger have committed to take these concrete reparative steps that will yield immediate dividends for the community, whereas Manouchehri and Cienfuegos have rejected them outright.
#4:
We Already Know What Judy 2.0 Looks Like
As shocking as Manouchehri’s MAGAfication has been to many Beverly Hills residents, the playbook she is running is ripped directly from one of her Californio contemporaries. To find out what happens if we do reward Manouchehri’s behavior by allowing her to retain, or even expand, her current control of the Board, we need only look just a bit further down-ballot this election cycle to the Superintendent of Public Instruction race.
The Republican nominee, Sonja Shaw, is a turbo-charged evangelical Christian version of Manouchehri — a school board president who leans heavily on a congenial soccer mom persona while flexing a 3-2 majority to push through unpopular policies that quickly hemorrhage district funds. Going through Shaw’s list of “accomplishments,” it is remarkable how many line up directly with Manouchehri’s recent and hinted-at future endeavors at BHUSD:
Changing the Board’s bylaws to eliminate egalitarian officer rotation — sound familiar?
Banning displays of the Pride flag on school campuses - sound familiar?
Autocratic management of public comment rights - sound familiar?
Entertaining book banning policies - sound familiar?
Ballooning legal costs, including $1.2 million spent in 2024 - sound familiar?
Hostility to teachers and teachers’ unions - sound familiar?
Shaw’s campaign has set off five-alarm fires for those resisting the MAGAfication of our schools, and the students of Chino Valley USD (Shaw’s home district) were so disgusted with her that they organized to form Chino Valley Students for Change, sharing personal accounts of how Shaw’s policies have harmed their educational experience. So, of course, Russell Stuart is a huge fan, as are all the right-wing voter guides supporting Manouchehri and Cienfuegos. Shaw was even recommended on a sample ballot (of questionable legality) attached to campaign email sent by Manouchehri in advance of a ballot harvesting party.
The stunning overlap in rhetoric, governance, and support network between Manouchehri and Shaw gives us a sneak preview of what we can expect from an emboldened Manouchehri presidency. Do not let her practiced denials fool you — when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Conclusion
If you haven’t already, vote Kimberly Lifschitz and Jackie Kruger for the BHUSD Board of Education.
You have four days.
Use them wisely.