Are you a parent wanting to know what exactly the local school is teaching your child? Looking for official documentation of those lessons or the policies that motivated them? Better have millions of dollars in the piggy bank because that’s what these taxpayer funded institutions are demanding parents pay for access to public records through FOIA request.
The impetus for the sudden interest from parents in school activities is obvious. Attempts by educators to indoctrinate children with covid propaganda, including lessons on “anti-vaxxers” and even giving children vaccines without parental consent led to a wave of parental participation in how their local schools operate.
Multiple state supreme courts have blocked parental lawsuits and set a precedent giving schools immunity from litigation, specifically concerning health related policies. The only other option for citizens with children was to force their way into school board meetings and watch every move of the people involved.
FOIA requests have become frequent because schools refused to offer lesson transparency. In other words, school officials and teachers unions assert that they are not required to tell parents what their children are being taught, so the only way to know is to press the issue through access to public records.
But getting a FOIA request fulfilled is becoming a nightmare – Schools continue to believe that they do not answer to the public and are using every loophole at their disposal to stop parents from getting the info they need. One such loophole is the use of fees related to FOIA. Legally, the fees are not allowed to surpass the actual costs required for employees to gather the requested information. However, school officials are ignoring this requirement and hyperinflating the fees in order to dissuade parents from continuing FOIA.
One such example is the Rochester Community School District in Michigan, which was recently forced to pay nearly $190,000 to parent Elena Dinverno as settlement for allegedly keeping a ‘dossier’ on her after she criticized their virtual learning policy during the covid padnemic. District officials reportedly contacted Dinverno’s employer and used the dossier to get her fired.
When other parents contacted the schools in the area for information, they were stonewalled. Elizabeth Clair, mother to a seventh grader studying in the same district, decided to file a Freedom of Information Act request in 2022. She wanted to know what the school was doing to ‘stem future retaliation against parents’.
The financial analyst had asked to see six months’ worth of emails that had the word ‘anti-retaliation’ in them. In September 2022, Clair heard back from FOIA Coordinator Matthew McDaniel who told her that she would have to pay over $33 million for an employee, who was being paid $46 an hour, to review 21,514,288 emails. The district also asked for a good faith deposit of $16,551,616.28 for the process to begin.
Similar fees have also been used by schools to prevent parental access to information on woke propaganda lessons, including Critical Race Theory indoctrination, DEI lessons and classes on gender fluid theory. The primary organizations blocking parental access are national teachers unions. They are the driving force behind the fast spread of woke indoctrination in the US school system, with a greenlight from the Department of Education, of course.
The underlying hypocrisy is that teachers and school districts claim they are doing nothing wrong, yet, if that was the case they would not feel the need to hide their activities behind litigation, intimidation and a corrupt FOIA fee process. The bottom line is that parents have every right to know what schools are teaching their kids. Their taxes pay the salaries of those educators. Schools are not co-parents.
A campaign to break up teachers unions is necessary, along with a complete reformation of the American public school system. School choice legislation (which teachers unions viciously oppose) could also be used to take down schools that have been overrun by progressives, simply by giving parents easier access to alternatives. In the new Trump era the public education system faces a reckoning that is well deserved.
Until that day, parents may need pull their children out of these institutions and home school. It’s the only way to be sure their kids aren’t being brainwashed.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 12/22/2024 – 21:35
