Little evidence to support administration claims of threats and violence against school boards

 Caroline Downey:

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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.
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The evidence suggests clear overreach by the Biden administration on matters that at best are matters for local law enforcement if at all.  I suspect the Biden move will add to the political woes of this administration as they alienate voters who are concerned about leftists' indoctrination of their children.  The Biden administration appears to be tone-deaf when it comes to its support of the racist CRT agenda.  Mask requirements are also a hot local issue being pushed by control freaks.

See, also:

ENEMIES OF THE STATE