Vast Majority of Incidents Cited by School-Board Group to Justify Federal Intervention Didn’t Involve Threats By Caroline Downey
In a memorandum issued this week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to collaborate with state U.S. attorneys and federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies to probe and potentially prosecute violent threats against teachers and administrators in school districts nationwide.
The notice comes after the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration, asking it to investigate and determine whether the increasing number of confrontations between angry parents and school boards qualify as domestic terrorism under the Patriot Act.
“Threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent — during public school board meetings, via documented threats transmitted through the U.S. Postal Service, through social media and other online platforms, and around personal properties,” the organization claims, citing what it considers egregious episodes in 23 school districts over the last several months.
However, the vast majority of incidents referenced by the NSBA don’t qualify as threats of physical violence, according to local news reports cited in the group’s letter — nor is it obvious what the federal government’s role would be in responding to them.
Out of 24 incidents cited by the NSBA, 16 consisted of tense verbal exchanges between parents and school-board members that did not escalate to threats of physical violence. In many of these cases, the aggravated parents disrupted school-board meetings by angrily objecting to their districts’ mandatory masking policies and/or embrace of critical-race-theory curricula.
In other cases, parents picketed outside school-board meetings, wielding signs and chanting politically charged slogans. In some instances, the angry parents shouted over school-board members or exceeded their allotted speaking time during the meeting’s public-comment period. In some of these incidents, the police intervened to eject parents who refused to wear masks or were being otherwise unruly. In none of these cases was a threat of physical violence issued.
However, there have been certain exceptions in which angry verbal exchanges devolved into legitimate threats.
In Worthington City School District in Ohio, a school-board member reportedly received a threatening letter. In Beaver Dam Unified School District in Wisconsin, a school-board member claims that people in cars have stopped at his house to photograph his address. In Loudoun County, Va., school-board members have reportedly received death threats. At a Birmingham Public Schools board meeting, an audience member gave a Nazi salute during a public-comment period. In a few towns, parents were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
While the behavior in those few cases was criminal, it falls under the jurisdiction of state and local authorities, not the federal government.
And those criminal acts constitute rare exceptions among instances of rude — but nonetheless law-abiding — behavior on the part of the majority of parents referenced in the NSBA letter, who are themselves a fraction of the total number of parents who have protested and spoken out at school-board meetings across the country in recent weeks. In one example of such rude behavior, a parent in Tennessee’s Rutherford County mocked a student during a meeting for mentioning his grandmother who had died of COVID while making the case for sustained pandemic-mitigation measures.
In other cases cited by the NSBA, parents aggressively asserted their parental rights without crossing the line into physical intimidation or harassment.
“You work for us. We’re not going to back down,” a parent said defiantly at a Clark County school-board meeting in Nevada. “My child, my choice,” a parent yelled at a school-board meeting on masking in Iredell-Statesville school district in North Carolina.
According to Wenyuan Wu, an Asian-American woman and the executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, which fights against the imposition of critical race theory in the Poway and San Diego school districts, these two dozen incidents offer a skewed perspective on the grassroots parent uprising taking place across the country.
In fact, she believes the Biden administration will exploit this handful of confrontations, none of which obviously warrant federal intervention, to weaponize federal agencies against dissenting parents. Garland’s order will effectively chill free speech, she says.
There are 1,000 school districts in California alone, each with an elected board. Boards meet regularly, at least once a month, making 9,000 regular meetings in the past nine months of the year, Wu noted. If you multiply that number by the total number of school boards nationwide, 24 incidents is a drop in the bucket, she added.
“It’s like bringing 911 to a paper cut. Maybe there are a few isolated incidents of disruption or dissent, but that’s not even 1 percent of all concerned parents,” she said. “They’re cherry-picking the evidence.”
Referring to a school-board meeting in Poway on September 9 that turned disruptive, Wu, who has helped coordinate peaceful rallies with parents on two occasions in the town, said, “That is a one-off, extremely rare event of disruption. That by no means represents the entirety of parent-led movements both in San Diego and around the country to hold school-board members accountable.”
She argued that discussions over the implementation of CRT should not happen behind closed doors and that parents are the primary stakeholders in education.
“Both the DOJ and NSBA are misrepresenting the genuine movement at the local level. What they’re doing is a tremendous government overreach, using power they do not have to silence parents and taxpayers who are genuinely worried about the direction in which our public education is headed,” she added.
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