When 18-year-old Shane Anderson sees campaign signs lining the streets for his mother, Kelli, he doesn’t see a school board candidate. He sees the woman who told him to choose between a relationship with her and a relationship with a man. He said she also called him a “f-ggot” and a “pedophile” after he came out as gay.

Kelli is a member of the Queen Creek Unified School District Governing Board and is running to keep her seat in the upcoming election.

Although she is an incumbent, Kelli, a first-term board member and Army veteran, has never been elected to the governing board. Maricopa County Superintendent of Schools Shelli Boggs appointed her in 2025, sparking controversy after Boggs bypassed three district-recommended candidates in favor of Kelli.

“Anderson recognizes that students learn in different ways, supports school choice, and is a strong advocate for career and technical education,” Boggs said in a news release after the appointment. “She also stands firmly against DEI-driven policies that distract from the core mission of education.”

Since joining the board, Kelli, a staunch MAGA conservative who also works for Turning Point USA, has introduced a policy expanding oversight of classrooms and school library books, which the board unanimously approved. She also supported the district’s adoption of “Land of Hope,” a history curriculum backed by the Goldwater Institute. The U.S. history textbook presents a patriotic account of the nation’s past and has drawn criticism for its treatment of slavery, racism and other historical injustices.

For the past five months, Shane has lived with his longtime best friend, Sophia Stevens, after leaving home. He described life at home under Kelli after coming out as “devastating.” He said his mother restricted where he could drive, barred him from seeing friends, went through his phone, searched his belongings and destroyed sentimental items in his room.

“So you want to suck dick for the rest of your life?”

—Shane Anderson, on what he remembers his mother saying to him when he said he liked boys in middle school.

While still living at home, Shane prepared a second phone and an emergency bag that he would eventually use to flee. He left with the help of a police officer. A month later, Kelli filed paperwork to run for the school board.

LOOKOUT has reached out to Kelli Anderson for comment on the allegations and is awaiting a response.

Homeschooling lessons

Years before Kelli began helping govern a public school district, Shane said, his mother had already made a consequential decision about public education inside their home.

Toward the end of Shane’s eighth-grade year in 2022, she abruptly pulled him and his two sisters out of public school.

He claimed the decision came after one of his younger sisters came home and asked their mother about a conversation her classmates had on the playground about being transgender. His mother was appalled, he said.

“She decided that the gays were coming too close to home,” Shane said, “and so she pulled all of us out of school.”

Kelli’s 2026 candidate statement, however, offers a different explanation: “After each of our children was underserved in different ways, we ultimately made the decision to educate them at home.”

For Stevens, the decision meant suddenly losing her best friend.

The two had met months earlier in eighth-grade science class at Eastmark Junior High. Stevens was quiet and timid; Shane was the opposite — loud, outgoing and quick to make friends. Their friendship blossomed, and Shane eventually invited her to a park, where he played guitar while she sang.

“I’ve never had a friend who wanted to go out and do activities before,” Stevens said.

Soon, the two were inseparable, making the news of Shane’s withdrawal from school all the more devastating.

“It was pretty lonely,” she said. “He was like my only friend at the time.”

Around the time Shane was pulled from school to be homeschooled, his mother found a gay romance story on his phone. He took the opportunity to come out and tell her about a boy he liked.

He vividly remembers her response: “So you want to suck dick for the rest of your life?” Shane said he had only ever wanted to hold hands with the boy.

From then on, he knew coming out wasn’t an option. He said he felt “miserable” being homeschooled and described the experience as deliberate isolation intended to keep him away from “the gays.”

“If I didn’t [get a job], then I would’ve never had a social outing,” he said.

Shane said all his coursework, except for math, revolved around the Bible. He recalled that “every other page” of his science book contained a section posing a question he remembers as, “How can we attribute this to God?”

Shane shared with LOOKOUT the constitutional literacy curriculum he was taught at home. It includes chapters dedicated to homosexuality and abortion and uses the Ku Klux Klan as an example to defend hate speech under the First Amendment. It also describes the advancement of LGBTQ+ rights as an “assault on freedom.”

One essay prompt asks students to “discuss the threat to intellectual and religious freedom posed by the homosexual rights movement.”

A lavender relationship

Shane and Stevens’ friendship went dormant while he was out of school. But they devised a workaround: a lavender relationship. Kelli wanted Shane and Stevens to date, and pretending to be a couple gave them an excuse to keep seeing each other while allowing Shane more freedom to leave the house.

Stevens’ mother, Clarissa Cook, knew the relationship was a front. She wanted to protect the arrangement out of concern for Shane’s well-being.

“We just weren’t sure what was going to happen,” she said. “We both told him, ‘You can come here at any time.’”

Meanwhile, Shane feared what his parents might do if they discovered the truth.

“Best-case scenario, they just throw me into conversion therapy,” he said. He also contemplated the possibility of a physical altercation in the worst-case scenario.

His efforts to conceal his sexuality began to unravel when he attended his senior prom with friends. Shane left the house wearing a button-down shirt, tie and slacks, just as he had when he took Stevens to their eighth-grade winter formal.

He arrived at prom wearing a dress.

Despite his best efforts to hide his outfit, Kelli found a single photo of him in the dress on a friend’s public Instagram account.

“She was looking really hard,” Shane said. “The only image where you could see what I was wearing was very dark and low exposure.”

When Shane returned home late from work the next day, he said his mother was waiting at the kitchen counter with the prom photo. When she asked why he was wearing a dress, he confessed.

“It’s because I’m gay,” he recalled saying. He said Kelli “physically revolted” at the revelation, sparking a fight that lasted weeks.

“I better not see that b-tch in public."

— Shane Anderson recalled his mother threatening his friend, 17-year-old Sophia Stevens, after learning she hid her son's sexuality from her.

After learning that Shane and Stevens had only pretended to date, Shane said his mother threatened Stevens, who was 17 at the time and a student in the district Kelli governs.

“I better not see that b-tch in public,” Shane recalled her saying.

He also said his mother accused Stevens’ mother of being a “groomer” and a “pedophile” because she knew Shane was gay and had not told his parents.

Shane decided it was time to leave. He walked into the garage, grabbed a stack of large Costco trash bags and began packing his belongings. He said Kelli tried to stop him from going upstairs, telling him he could take only the clothes on his back.

He said his mother began listing everything he would lose by moving out, including access to his car, bank account and health insurance.

That’s when Shane reached into his closet and pulled out the emergency bag. He went to a nearby park, met up with friends and sat with them until 3 a.m. as he struggled through panic attacks.

‘The greatest, longest sleepover’

Three days later, on June 3, Shane returned to collect the rest of his belongings. He said his parents told him to wait outside while they packed his things, but he refused, saying he did not trust them to return everything that belonged to him.

The dispute escalated, and Shane left the house to call police for a civil standby. He said an officer told his parents they had to allow him inside to retrieve his belongings.

Shane said his mother came outside and began furiously removing his things from the house. When he later opened the boxes she brought out, he noticed some of the glassware had been cracked or broken.

“I wanted to hope that her maternal instincts would kick in and that she would just be like, ‘Well, I don’t agree with it, but I still love you and we’ll figure it out.’ But that’s not what happened.”

—Clarissa Cook, who took Shane in after he fled his mother's home.

With the officer’s assistance, Shane said he was eventually allowed inside. He hurriedly stuffed the rest of his possessions into bags as his parents watched. He said he was scared, even though his friends and the officer were just outside.

Much of the encounter was a daze, but he remembered one thing clearly: “I looked at the floor, and I saw that there was paper torn all over the floor.”

He said all the hand-drawn holiday cards Stevens had made for him over the years had been torn to shreds.

Since leaving home, Shane has shared a room with Stevens, sleeping beneath her loft bed. He now works two jobs, pays all his own expenses and is navigating life without his family’s support.

The two described the arrangement as the “greatest, longest sleepover” ever.

For Cook, taking Shane in meant ensuring he had a safe place to go when he needed it.

“I could never possibly replace his mom, but I just wanted to be there and let him know he had support,” Cook said. “I wanted to hope that her maternal instincts would kick in and that she would just be like, ‘Well, I don’t agree with it, but I still love you and we’ll figure it out.’ But that’s not what happened.”

One of Cook’s greatest fears was that Shane might hurt himself. Shane said he shared that concern about what might have happened without support.

“If I didn’t have the support that I did have, I would be in such an awful place,” he said. “I probably wouldn’t be here.”

‘Everything that she can do to other people’

In the weeks after Shane left home, Kelli texted him every night, sending pages of messages saying, “I love you” or “I forgive you.” Shane ignored the texts and eventually blocked her number, coming to terms with the possibility that things would never change.

Now, as he sees his mother’s campaign signs lining the streets, he said he feels “something akin to rage” and worries about children who may not have the same support system he had.

“I don’t want what happened to me to happen to anybody else, whether it be my sisters or other kids in the school district,” he said, “because I know I was miserable.”

Shane said he still has not received his high school diploma because he is missing a history credit. Given their estrangement and lack of contact, he does not expect to receive it anytime soon.

Cook, who watched her own daughter become involved in the conflict and face personal attacks, still has two children in the district. She is concerned about Kelli’s influence as a school board member. She said it is difficult to separate Kelli’s political work as a Turning Point USA employee from her role overseeing a public school system.

“She has her own agenda,” Cook said. “I’m super uncomfortable with that.”

For Shane, that is what makes seeing his mother’s name on campaign signs different now. He no longer sees only the person whose decisions shaped his childhood. He sees a public official asking voters for the power to help shape the education of thousands of other children according to her own values.

“When I see those campaign signs, it’s just a reminder of everything that she did,” he said, “and everything that she can do to other people.”