The Daily Signal - Parents Need to Know Their Rights to Reclaim America's Schools

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Starting with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread school closures, parents got a firsthand look at their children's education through virtual instruction—and they didn't always like what they saw happening. The parental revolt of 2021 toppled Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia's gubernatorial election after he infamously quipped, "I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." Frustrated parents propelled Republican Glenn Youngkin to the governor's office in Richmond. Across the country, concerned citizens ran for school boards—and won. And today, parents are rightfully demanding information from their schools. The Southeastern Legal Foundation is stepping in to help parents. Kimberly Hermann, the organization's general counsel, spoke to The Daily Signal about parental rights and the resources available to them. Listen to the full interview or read a lightly edited transcript at DailySignal.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Monday, July 18th. I'm Virginia Allen. And I'm Rob Lewy. On today's show, I speak with Kimberly Herman, General Counsel for the Southeastern Legal Foundation, about how parents can assert their rights and take control of their children's education. We also read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about the power of generosity and honesty. But first, before we get to today's show, we want to tell you about the most reliable source of global economic data, the 2022 Heritage Index of Economic Freedom.

The Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom ranks nearly every nation in the world according to its level of economic freedom. Whether for personal or professional research, the index is a well of information. And this year's index provides so many unique insights on more than 170 countries across the world. Visit heritage.org slash index

to explore the 2022 Index of Economic Freedom, which features interactive maps, country rankings, graphs of data, and much, much more. Now stay tuned for today's show. Coming up next. We are joined on the Daily Signal podcast today by Kim Herman, General Counsel for the South Eastern Legal Foundation. We're here at the Heritage Foundation's Resource Bank meeting. And Kim, you had the opportunity to speak today.

Thank you so much for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. You are engaged in a number of different fights, but I want to focus specifically on parental rights. we've seen this take center stage here in the period after COVID, particularly in my home state of Virginia, where the governor, Glenn Yonkin, was propelled into office, I think largely because parents were upset and frustrated by what they were hearing and what they were frankly seeing as their kids were sent home and not allowed to return to the classroom. You've done some excellent work to give parents a handbook and really a lesson for what they can do to be engaged. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Yeah, so actually a couple years ago, it was pre-COVID. We started to see this issue of woke education pop up across our country. First, we started to see it in the colleges. And then once we as parents, I'm a mom of two littles, actually had a front-row seat to what was happening in the schools through virtual learning, we saw that our kids were being indoctrinated with a lot of racial programming that actually was teaching them to pit each other or pit one another against each other based on the color of their skin. and we knew at Southeastern Legal Foundation that we had to get into action there. And so we started working with people to file lawsuits across the country and also to create things like a parent guidebooks that parents can actually have the tools to educate themselves and to fight on their own

when maybe a lawsuit isn't appropriate or the facts don't justify it yet. So I think for many of us we saw this firsthand in 2020 in part because kids were home or were spending a lot more time with them, maybe observing what was going on in the classrooms, Also, we had George Floyd and everything that happened in the aftermath of his death. But this has really been going on much earlier. Maybe it just wasn't on our radar. As you've done work on this, tell us a little bit about the history and how this came to become such an important part of public schools' curriculum, disturbingly so. Yeah, I mean, to understand that, it really does go back to the 60s when you look at the civil rights movement.

And there's a faction in the civil rights movement that really wanted to undermine. our country and undermine our constitution. And when their arguments didn't win the day, they went into the academy. And that's really where you can take a stakeholder, right, is you build it into the education system and you teach the teachers critical race theory, which really is the idea that our country is based on white supremacy and that the only way to end that is to undermine our constitution, undermine our legal system. If you actually pick up the books that are called, you know, critical race theory, this is what they teach. And so they've been building it into the schools for decades through the teachers. So teach the teachers this,

then they teach the kids this. And like you said, it really didn't come to light where parents saw it until recently. But this is nothing new. It's just come in in many different ways. And now they've really dug in deep during the Biden administration. And they're calling parents domestic terrorists. I mean, they're investigating parents that speak out against this. And it's not going to end until we start winning in court and changing their laws throughout the country. Well, let's come back to that in a moment. But tell us a little bit about if for the parents who are listening what they should be on the lookout for. If they have a child who's coming home and maybe there are certain questions, they should be asking them. And I think as you indicated, it's not just a casual conversation. It's embedded in other subjects. I mean, it might come up in math and history and English and all sorts of places. Yeah, I mean, you'll see math word problems that say things, you know, about race specific. specifically. There's 10 kids in the class and eight of them are oppressors. How many are white?

Right? I mean, those are the type of word problems that you'll see. So they just need to be looking at all of the curriculum. And a lot of times parents can't get their hands on it. And so that's been one of the hardest battles is fighting for transparency. It's been great to see these laws change. But parents just have to keep on being diligent. Get the documents. Get all of the textbooks. If your kids even use them, many schools don't use them anymore get the iPads log on to their canvas and see what they're actually looking at in the classroom because like you said it's coming in in every single subject across the board in every single grade including down to segregation we actually have some schools one that we have sued that has mandatory affinity groups and they put the white teachers in one room the non-white teachers in

another room teach the teachers different lessons on racial programming that they then take into the classroom and they mimic what they did in the teacher training. Segregation was outlawed over 70 years ago. So obviously if you see segregation in your kids' classrooms, ask them about that. It needs to stop. And you guys need to take action. We all do.

What rights do parents have when it comes to trying to access curriculum and get more information? Yeah, so they can use their state FOIA laws, which is one way to get them. But what parents don't realize is that they don't even have to do that. There are federal laws out there that require schools to give over all instructional materials. So this is obviously with public schools, since they're federal laws for schools that get federal funding. But you can ask for any instructional materials, which

includes teacher trainings. It includes workbooks. It includes everything except for tests. So your school doesn't have to give you tests or standardized testing materials, but everything else falls under these federal laws. And so you do have a right to get all of it. And what are some of the cases that you've brought to help parents get either get access to this information or to maybe push back on some of the policies that we've seen implemented. Yeah, so actually our friends at Goldwater Institute have brought some really great cases dealing with public transparency when the parents have filed FOIAs and they haven't been able to get the documents. What we've been doing at Southeastern Legal Foundation is submitting some of our own foias. And when the schools and specifically the school board associations don't want to give us those documents, we have filed suit in several states on that issue. But really, it's just helping the parents understand that when they get a bill or when they're told, hey, the only way you can get these is by giving us $150,000 for the time.

That's not reasonable. And sometimes it's just a matter of knowing that you do have the rights to stand up. And again, they have to give them to you outside of state FOIA laws. And a lot of these school districts don't even realize that. So bringing that to their attention is really key. And what recourse to parents have for private schools or religious schools that may not be subject to, some of the same standards as public schools. Yeah, so it's really challenging when you're talking about private schools because these parents sign

contracts and basically saying the schools can largely do whatever they want. I actually am a private school parent, and so I've seen those contracts up close and personal. But again, it's really it's talking to your board of trustees at the schools. That's the number one piece of advice that I give private school parents. A lot of times they don't know what's happening in the classroom in the private school. So make sure that your board knows it, find your allies on it, find your allied teachers. And hope is not lost for the private schools that have brought this in. We've been really fortunate that we've seen a lot of religious schools reject this,

but it's also a matter of, are they religious a name or are they truly a religious school? And that's a whole other discussion. Are there particular states that are doing things well, and you would point to as good examples and others where maybe you've had to press the legal case a little bit more strongly? Yeah, well, I think Florida is doing some really good things that we've all seen. They've passed some legislation. We'll see how it ends up standing up. But the transparency legislation that we've seen there is great.

We've also seen a lot of action out of Missouri, specifically with the Missouri Attorney General. So a lot of state attorney generals have powers to actually investigate these school districts and to enforce federal privacy laws. And many of them, some of their offices don't even realize it. But in Missouri, we've actually filed several requests for investigation, and Attorney General Eric Schmidt there has taken action and has launched those investigations for things like surveys that ask kids about their sexual behavior, their sexual activity, their parents, what's happening in the school, their mental health,

all things that's protected information. At the Daily Signal, we've interviewed parents, one not far from the D.C. area, Marianne Jensen in northern Virginia, who have had, difficult time just gaining access to the school board meetings, being prevented from entering a room because of COVID restrictions and things like that. What are some of the steps that either your handbook offers or that your organization is able to provide parents who might want to follow up on this interview and get more information about how they can be more active, I guess, in their kids' life? Yeah, we have the guidebook that we published a few weeks ago that they can download from

our website, sLFliberty.org. And when it comes to school board meetings, you know, one of the things that we're doing is we're trying to figure out where these policy changes are coming from, because it's not just one school board. We're seeing school boards across the country that are basically silencing parents and preventing them from coming. And so we have filed a lot of foias and several lawsuits to uncover that information to help parents know that they have rights. But just keep going to your school board. You can always give us a call. There's other great parent advocacy groups, moms for liberty, parents defending education, no left turn in education, three great groups. And if you're not working with one of them, I just really encourage parents to get in touch with

them also. You mentioned earlier that this is not just a local issue. The Biden administration has gotten involved as well as the Department of Education when it comes to targeting parents in some cases through this National School Board's Association. Bring your listeners up to speed on that particular aspect of the story and where things stand today. Yeah, so we know now that the White House, the Department of Justice and the National School Board Association, we're all colluding together to basically give parents a special tag. Basically, when the FBI investigates something, they put different threat tags associated with those investigations.

And there is a specific threat tag now for parents, and I can tell you several of them have come forward. For several parents who have been investigated for speaking up at school board meetings have come forward, they blew the whistle, they have spoken with Congress. committees. We have spoken with other parents who have been investigated, and this threat is real. You go to a school board meeting, you speak out, you threaten to vote them out, and then the next thing you do is you have the FBI calling you, and it is very scary. But there are attorneys, there are groups out there like us and some of our friends who can help them through that process, and just don't

let them deter you. But at the end of the day, the threat is real from the Biden administration. They really aren't playing around in the sense of when they said they were going to be. to investigate parents and do everything they could to silence us. That's what they're doing. In your experience in talking to some of these parents, are the FBI questions and the investigations warranted? Or is this really a gross overreach on their part? So far, none of the ones that we've talked to are they warranted in any way, shape, or form. We've seen, you know, video evidence of what's actually happening at these meetings. And the questions a lot of times are from the field officers. And you can tell largely that they don't want to be doing this necessarily. They're people of their

communities at the end of the day, but all of these threats run through D.C. All of the threat tags come from the D.C. office. And so we know that it's coming straight from the White House and from the top down. And, you know, the writing was on the wall. Back in 2019, there was a teacher that filed an office of civil rights complaint, basically saying, hey, my district's segregating students, and it needs to stop. The Department of Ed said, you're right. It needs to stop. And two days, three days after Biden was inaugurated, the administration would drew that finding. So we have an administration that thinks that segregation in schools is okay. So they're certainly going to go after parents who are

trying to stop that. Well, thank you for the work you're doing to help parents. It's one of many issues that you work on at the Southeastern Legal Foundation. What are some of the other big battles, big fights that you have going on right now that you'd like our listeners to know about? Yeah, I mean, outside of the school world, we do a lot to just stop the Biden administration from overreaching, whether it's suing the EPA or suing for property rights. We do a lot of property rights work. And we also do a lot of work to help college students on their campuses through our 1A project. So we train thousands of students a year on their rights and we're actually working on taking that programming and turning it

into programming for parents and working with some of the advocacy groups that I mentioned before to bring that similar training so that parents can arm themselves better and can get out there and fight because if we don't save the schools now, then it's going to be lost for our generation, or kids' generation. Speak a little bit more about your work on college campuses. I mean, so many of us, I think, have seen the videos and other examples that are frankly appalling because college campuses should be the place where you are able to have the freedom of expression and have those tough conversations.

And unfortunately, it seems like that's becoming less and less slow with the case today. Yeah, I mean, all of the silencing really did start on the college campuses. And so it was probably about eight to ten years ago that we started to work with college students to help fix their policies, right? There's a number of groups out there that do this. Our focus is mainly on the litigation aspect of it until we learn that these college students don't really understand the First Amendment. So they're out there and they want to fight for it, but they don't understand what their rights are or maybe even why we have a First Amendment. And so we've worked both with Heritage Foundation and with Leadership Institute to bring this programming

like I said to thousands of students across the country when small webinars where we actually go through their policies with them, help them understand how they can fight back if they need to be changed and how they can just speak freely on campus. And we really encourage them to not silence others either. Not everyone's going to agree with you, but if you're going to fight for the First Amendment, let's let's let everyone speak. And let's just bring civil discourse back to our college campuses. I think that's great advice, Kim.

Thanks for the work that you're doing at the Southeastern Legal Foundation. We'll be sure to include a link, both in the transcript and the show notes for the parent handbook and other resources that your organization provides. Thank you so much for being with The Daily Signal. Great. Thanks so much for having me. At the Heritage Foundation, we believe voting is a sacred duty. It's how people express what course they want our nation to take. Given the importance of the ballot box,

it's necessary to have a transparent and fraud-free system that can be trusted. This is why Heritage created the Election Integrity Scorecard. The scorecard compares the laws and regulations for elections, state-to-state, and ranks them on their security and transparency. Check out the Election Integrity Scorecard at heritage.org slash election scorecard. Thanks for sending us your letters to the editor. Each Monday we feature our favorites on this show. Virginia, who's up first?

In response to Doug Blair's article, Justice's home addresses blasted on social media with zero consequences. Elizabeth Corr writes, Dear Daily Signal, Douglas Blair's report on pro-abortion activist publication of the home addresses of Supreme Court justices is so disheartening. I am so sick of the unfathomable, deplorable tactics of the left. I think of the peaceful protests by pro-life Americans, the March for Life in the Nation's Capitol, the over-regulated sidewalk vigils at Planned Parenthood facilities, and 40 days for life, among many others.

In the end, I hope working peacefully and lawfully, but hard, will win the day. And in response to that same article, Emma Gifford of Naples, Florida, writes, rules for thee, but not for me. That seems to be the rule of thumb for some people. By the way, were the addresses of the three liberal Supreme Court justices posted? Just wondering why or why not? No chance for pro-lifers to protest their decisions in this way. That wouldn't have mattered. They know it's against the law, so they wouldn't do it. It's called respect. Your letter can be featured on next week's show, so send us an email at letters at daily signal.com. takes the field on offense with their young leaders program.

I'm Evelyn Homily from Hillsdale College. I'm Harrison Stewart from the University of Virginia. I'm a journalism intern with the Daily Signal. I'm a digital productions intern in communications. For spring, summer, and fall semesters, the Heritage Foundation hosts undergraduate and postgraduate interns right here in the nation's capital to train our country's future conservative leaders.

As a Daily Signal intern, I've had the opportunity to cover exciting events here in D.C. And work in a fast-paced environment with some of the conservative movements best journalists. In YLP, interns are on the cutting edge of the conservative movement, attending exclusive briefings from heritage experts, members of Congress, and movement leaders fighting for the fate of our country. It's been exciting connecting with big names in the political world and better understanding our nation's greatest threats. If you want to go on offense with other

passionate, dedicated conservatives, go to heritage.org slash intern to learn more about the young leaders program. Today we are joined by one of our Daily Signal Interns, Evelyn for the first time who has a little bit of good news to share with us today to kick off our Monday. Evelyn, over to you. Thanks, Virginia. This week's good news story takes us to Chula Vista, California, where a teenager demonstrated unusual maturity and integrity when he discovered a lost purse full of cash and credit cards in a grocery store shopping cart. Instead of leaving the purse where he found it or simply bringing it to the store owner, 17-year-old Adrian Rodriguez searched the purse for a driver's license, found a home address, and drove there hoping to return the purse to the owner.

If somebody found my stuff, I'd want them to bring it back to me. Although the purse's owner, Eliana Martine, had relocated without updating her license address, her former roommate Melina Marquez still lived at the home and received the purse from Adrian. Melina sent the doorbell video recording that showed the encounter to Eliana. She sent me the video. When I saw the video, I didn't think... child, man. It was a surprise for me.

Touched by the act of unusual kindness, Molina and Eliana decided to start a go-fund meet to reward Adrian. The page had an original goal of raising $1,000, but since it launched on June 25th, it's raised a staggering $17,000. I do the right thing when nobody's around. I didn't expect none of this. I just did it just to do it.

I didn't expect nothing back. Honestly, I just gave her purse. I didn't expect nothing. Melina and Eliana were able to meet with Adrian and thank him in person for doing the right thing. I think it's such an amazing thing what you did. It's kids your age. I heard you just graduated high school, right? Yeah, it's just amazing.

Adrian's story has inspired people across the nation to pay it forward and serves as a reminder that integrity is doing what is right even if no one is watching. Evelyn, thank you so much for sharing that story. Very encouraging and a great way to start the week. We're going to leave it there for today. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on the Rurkishay Audio Network, and all of our shows can be found at dailysignal.com slash podcasts. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review and a five-star rating.

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