Tag: school board

School board members reported mom to employer, DOJ for criticizing COVID school closures

School board members reported a police detective to her employer and the U.S. Department of Justice for showing “disrespect,” making “over dramatic” comments about COVID-19 school policies and threatening to sue the district if it kept interrupting her at board meetings.

According to the lawyer for Michigan’s Chippewa Valley Schools, the elected school board members were just exercising their First Amendment rights as private citizens, and the board had no involvement.

Sandra Hernden filed a First Amendment retaliation lawsuit against the school board and members Frank Bednard and Elizabeth Pyden, seeking to remove qualified immunity from the individual public officials for violating “a clearly defined constitutional right.”

Even if Bednard and Pyden lose legal protection and face personal liability, Hernden won’t seek more than $1 in nominal damages, according to Holly Wetzel, director of public relations for Hernden’s lawyers at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Bednard’s Oct. 5 2021 report to DOJ came a day after Attorney General Merrick Garland promised to prosecute “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school boards, which itself followed a National School Boards Association letter implying that harsh criticism of COVID policies was “domestic terrorism.”

The board president told fellow members and Superintendent Ronald Roberts that he had forwarded to DOJ Hernden’s email, which informed the board of an appeals court ruling prohibiting restrictions on “abusive” and “antagonistic” language at public meetings.

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Racist school board unanimously approves plan to pay non-white teachers more

If you feel like you live in an alternative universe where reductionism replaces logic and superficiality trumps character, here’s more evidence that you may be right. We might just be living in a racist version of The Twilight Zone.

The Mankato School Board in Minnesota voted unanimously to pay non-white teachers “additional stipends” based only on the color of their skin, according to BizPac Review. If you happen to be born black or Native American and teach for the school district, you ostensibly deserve to be paid more than your peers.

You don’t have to earn the raise for going the extra mile to help students or for actually doing anything at all. The pay raise is based upon the accident of skin color and nothing else. Forget the fact that nobody gets to determine the color of skin they’re born with.

The chair of the board, Jodi Sapp, is no stranger to controversy. She raised eyebrows when she required parents to give their name and address before commenting on school matters, The Daily Wire reported.

In this latest move, Sapp led the charge to amend district policy so that only non-white teachers are eligible for additional stipends to become mentors to other non-white colleagues.

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Florida School Board Moves to Censor Speakers and Prohibit Broadcast of Public Comments

In response to months of public backlash from parents and residents opposed to forced student masking, School Board members in Palm Beach County, Florida, are proposing new rules to censor and limit the public’s ability to voice their opinions and prohibit broadcasting of all public comments.

According to the School Board of Palm Beach County website, “speakers will not be denied the opportunity to speak on the basis of their viewpoint.” Pursuant to Florida statute § 286.0114, “the public shall be given a reasonable opportunity to be heard on a proposition before a board or commission.” Florida statute § 286.011 states that all meetings of public boards or commissions must be open to the public and the minutes of the meetings must be taken, promptly recorded, and open for public inspection.

The new policy, being drafted by school board attorneys, would limit the number of people who would be allowed to speak at public meetings and the amount of time they are allowed to speak. The new rules would also prohibit any speaker from addressing any board member by name, criticizing any board member, superintendent, or district staff member, and would prohibit the broadcasting of all public comments during all board meetings.

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Police Arrest Man For Not Sitting At Palm Beach School Board Meeting

Like thousands of other people across the country, Everett Cooper attended his local school board meeting to voice his concerns about mask mandates. His evening ended with a trip to jail as police dragged him out of the meeting, literally for refusing to sit down in a separate room where the unmasked and undesirables were “allowed” to be.

As Orwellian as this sounds, school board officials in Palm Beach, Florida, ordered the police to drag several people out of the meeting. These people weren’t even sitting in the same room with the school board members. Their crime? Standing up. Literally. They weren’t doing anything to disrupt the school board business. In the video, you can hear school board chair Frank Barbieri interrupt Superintendent Michael J. Burke, apparently seeing people on a monitor feed standing in the adjacent room. Barbieri starts telling people to sit down, then starts ordering police to drag people out as he identifies them.

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