A Kentucky mother, with the help of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, has launched a war on a scheme being used by schools to hide invasive student surveys: use of copyright laws.
The U.S. Supreme just this year affirmed parental rights in public schools by ruling against California’s agenda to hide gender identity manipulations of students in schools from their parents.
Now Miranda Stovall is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a lower courts ruling in her fight.
A report at Just the News describes the fight with Jefferson County Public Schools.
Officials there said a publisher, Pearson, which produces publications for schools, could sue the school for copyright infringement if it fulfilled Stovall’s Kentucky Open Records Act request for the Pearson-owned survey the schools used on children.
It was “inappropriate and intrusive,” based on what her child described, she charged.
And her lawyers have confirmed Pearson “notoriously pushes radical ideologies” as confirmed by the publishing corporation’s 2021 editorial guidance demanding “embedding anti-racism, social equity, and environmental sustainability in teaching and learning.”
Stovall told Just the News, “Without the records, I can’t go to a school board meeting and address my concerns with the school board or go to other parents and show them what is happening in our schools,” she said of the fight that’s already been going on for years.
The Southeastern Legal Foundation explains the matter is simple: Parents have a First Amendment right to “access any school materials” given to their children and to “speak out against them.”
The report explained schools using copyright law to conceal what they’re doing with students is becoming common.
“The Show-Me State’s courts approved the University of Missouri’s refusal to share syllabi with the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2014. The University of California Santa Barbara withheld a religion course syllabus from a Hindu activist in 2018. And North Carolina State denied a request for syllabi in 2021 because faculty owners denied permission,” the report noted.
Further disputes have developed in Arizona and Pennsylvania, where a school was rebuked by the courts to claiming its indoctrination into its own DEI ideology was a “trade secret,” like a Coca-Cola’s recipe.
Stovall’s concerns are like those of many parents, just exactly what information is the school demanding about “sexual orientation, sexual activity, drug and tobacco use, and mental health without parental consent or knowledge.”
She claims the right to discuss such surveys “with her child in the privacy of her own home, and so that she can show other parents the potentially intrusive and inappropriate questions,” the report said.
She wanted a “full digital copy of the ‘BESS Social and Emotional Screener’ or ‘Mental Health Screener’ or ‘Screener Questionnaire’ to be given in 6-12 grades during school.”
The school claims Pearson’s Behavior and Emotional Screening System is used to “determine student strengths and weaknesses” in their “behavioral and emotional well being,” the report said.
A major part of the agenda is a dispute over whether state courts or federal courts are to be used in such constitutional disputes. Judges in Stovall’s case have declared state courts must be the deciders in the constitutional questions presented by the fight.
