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A recall effort against Mountain View Whisman school board member Devon Conley has failed, with organizers not submitting the required signatures by the Dec. 16 legal deadline.
In order to get the recall on the ballot, supporters would have needed to submit signatures from at least 20% of the registered voters within the school district’s jurisdiction to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters by Tuesday. That would have meant 7,391 qualified signatures.
A representative from the registrar of voters confirmed this week that the recall effort ended when proponents did not submit petition pages by the deadline.
Quintin Riis, a district parent who announced the recall effort at a school board meeting in June, did not respond to the Voice’s requests for comment. Similarly, a message sent to an email used by the recall committee asking about the number of signatures collected and plans moving forward went unreturned.
Conley declined to comment for this article.
If the proponents wanted to pursue a recall again, they would need to start the process from the very beginning and none of their formerly filed documents with the registrar’s office could be re-used for the new effort, the representative said.
The initial effort to remove Conley from her elected position started after a year of controversy surrounding the district, including public outcry over spending on six-figure contracts for an external PR firm, executive leadership coaching and meditation sessions for top administrators.
A group of community members served Conley with a “notice of intention” to recall her at a June 12 meeting. At that meeting, Riis called on Conley to resign or face removal from office, accusing her of overseeing “deceit, fraud and grift” as board president in 2024.
In their notice of intention, proponents accused Conley of ignoring public concerns and “overlooking” then superintendent Ayindé Rudolph’s “spending of hundreds of thousands on travel, lavish hotels, meals, cable TV and other personal luxuries.”
Rudolph resigned in November 2024 while the state prepared to launch a formal audit of Mountain View Whisman to investigate potential fraud, misappropriation of funds or other illegal fiscal activity. In August, state officials released a report stating that there was not sufficient evidence to suggest that fraud had occurred in the district.
Conley was first elected in 2018 and won re-election to the school board unopposed in 2022. Her current term on the board expires in 2026.
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My husband mentioned these are the same embarrassing parents who said there was fraud and were against the parcel tax. I hope they have run out of dumb ideas.