School Tells Mom Pay $74,000 To Find Out If They're Teaching CRT (07/28/2021)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
When Nicole Solas, a Rhode Island mom, was preparing to enroll her daughter in kindergarten this year, she had one simple question: did the school teach critical race theory and gender theory to five-year-olds?
The answer to that question was not so simple, or at least, the South Kingstown, Rhode Island school district didn't want it to be. Both the principal and chair of the school committee told Solas she would need to submit public records requests in order to find out the content of her daughter's taxpayer-provided education.
When Solas submitted the requests, the school rejected them, claimed the requests were unclear. The school even held a meeting to discuss threats to sue Solas. When attorneys from the Goldwater Institute submitted another request on Solas's behalf, the school said they could hand over the documents — but only if Solas paid more than $74,000 in processing fees.
The Goldwater Institute's request was for any school communications that included terms such as "CRT," "white privilege," "gender theory," "1619 project," and "systemic racism." The school district estimated it would take 4,954 hours — more than 619 business days — to retrieve the documents mentioning those terms.
Jonathan Riches, the director of national litigation at the Goldwater Institute, said the fact that the district claimed it would take so many hours to comb through the documents indicated high levels of CRT in the curriculum.
"They're clearly speaking out of both sides of their mouth here. You have a situation where they have suggested that they're not teaching things like CRT, but then when you ask for real specific records of emails that include the phrase 'CRT,' and curriculum and lesson plans that include that phrase, they're saying it's 5,000 hours of time to go through all that," Riches said. "Obviously there's a lot of materials that are out there, a lot of communications that are out there that are discussing many of the very things that the school district is disavowing teaching."
Solas said the Goldwater Institute reached out to represent her after learning that the school district was evading her records requests.
"We believe the school is engaging in a pattern of obstructionism to prevent me from getting the information that I had requested on my own," Solas told the Federalist. "I felt like I was an enemy of the state from the beginning. This was my first experience with public school as a parent. I didn't think that I would be treated like an adversary but I'm getting more and more information from other parents who say that they're treated in similar ways too."
According to Solas, many other local parents have reached out to her privately to share their experiences of what their children learned in the South Kingstown district. The school refrains from calling students boys or girls, supports Black Lives Matter, and shames kindergartners for American ideals and traditions.
"They asked the students what could've been done differently on Thanksgiving," Solas said. "That is obviously a way to shame children for their American heritage. And it's really a ridiculous question to ask five-year-olds because they don't have a sense of history at all. To ask them what could've been done differently on Thanksgiving is impossible for a five-year-old to answer — I don't even know if an adult could answer that."
Riches told Fox News there was no reason it should be difficult for parents to find out what is being taught to their own children at taxpayer-funded schools.
"What our children learn in school shouldn't be a government secret," he said. "I don't think it's a controversial proposition to say we should have open and transparent government, especially when we're talking about publicly funded schools using our tax dollars and here you just have a conscientious parent asking 'Hey, what's my child going to learn?'"
The Goldwater Institute has responded to the school district and is in the process of determining next steps.
"Under Rhode Island law any request for fees has to be reasonable and that's the language that's used in the statute," according to Riches. "It seems to us that asking a parent to pay $74,000 to see what their kid is learning is not reasonable under any circumstances."
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Is the left evil?
Yes it is.
Never, ever should they have been allowed power.
gee, what happened to 1st amendment rights on school grounds from yesterday? did the rwnj wind direction change?
So, you all know that I was right?
do you mean radical right and/or autocrat right? I'd say that's pretty much a gimme for the readers.
Upset that the whole world won't march to leftist radical dogma?
"Deal with it"
I'm surprised they quoted only $74k. That's not even $15/hr. You can't possibly do it for that.
By the time they sort through all of this and then scrub it to avoid potential privacy violations, this is easily a $300k project.
And let's be honest, this will surely not be the last time this particular Karen has some sort of episode, so the sooner they run her off to private school the better.
She has over the past 2 years filed literally 100s of info requests from the school board which stamps her as an operative of the Goldwater Institute.
This particular Karen is a "stay at home" mom who passed the bar exam in Massachusetts but lives in RI.
She's "inundated" the school district with these 251 requests for documents
At this school board meeting, one request was for material only, never asking a question about the schools agenda, policies etc.
South Kingstown School Committee - The Trial of Nicole Solas - Bing video
In the first hour, one of the board members says estimates to accomplish these "FOIA" requests
run as high as $275,000.
Nicole Solas has since joined or started several Mom's rights groups and has been on many Fox
programs as a guest "expert" on CRT in schools and how the schools are hiding info from parents.
I wonder how long it will take her to run for election and to what office.
We used to call those "housewives".
I'm not convinced they can do it for that. I think it goes north of $300k quickly and heads toward $500k before anybody realizes it.
Like many others, she seems to have studied the book "Political Activism for Fun and Profit. How to Turn Your Irritating Personality and Batshit Beliefs Into a Profitable Side Hustle".
It's Rhode Island. You only need about 200 votes to become a Senator.
Is there a reason why an already one year old story that was already a year old when first reported being 'dusted' off?
Multiple choice, chose all that apply
1. Ignorance
2. Partisan BS
3. Because the right is evil.
Well, it kind of is. If this mom chooses, she could declare any content in the curriculum to be CRT or gender theory. The school could just as easily say it’s no such thing. It’s not like there is some universally agreed upon set of rules for this kind of thing. Oh sure, you can google it or find a textbook but that only takes you so far.
So for example, if we’re talking about a math class and there is some word problem about how many apples Susie needs to sell to earn a profit, what is the subject being taught? Is it math? Is it economics? Is it business? Is it political science focusing on capitalism? If Susie shares her profits with somebody, is the school promoting communism?
Right now schools are being used as a kind of political bogeyman, and it’s going to start encouraging ideological wack jobs to go shoot up a school.
Perhaps it would serve Nicole Solas better, both legally and ethically, if she would provide a paper explaining just exactly what Critical Race Theory is and the dangers, if any, to the society in general and the education system as a whole.