A school district in Kansas has been caught discriminating on the basis of religion, on the basis of viewpoint, violating free speech and parental rights and retaliating against students and parents for insisting on their constitutional rights, and a legal team representing the injured now is calling for a full investigation by the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education as well as the Department of Justice.
It is the American Center for Law and Justice that has taken up the fight on behalf of students at Marshall Elementary in USD 389 in Eureka, Kansas.
Its lawyers have dispatched a letter to federal officials calling for that investigation.
The basics are that the school was leading discussions of a “Find Your Voice” program, part of the “Leader in Me” effort, and asked students to identify their heroes.
But, school officials said, Charlie Kirk cannot be considered a hero, President Donald Trump cannot be considered a hero.
Explained the ACLJ:
A guidance counselor named Kacey Countryman assigned sixth-graders a project called “Find Your Voice” as part of the “Leader in Me” program. Students were asked to identify their role models and write them on a whiteboard for class discussion.
When a student named Charlie Kirk as a role model, Ms. Countryman became visibly uncomfortable. She refused to allow the name on the board, stating loudly that Kirk was “not a hero.” When the student teacher had already begun writing his name, Ms. Countryman ordered it erased. Another student selected President Donald J. Trump as a role model. Ms. Countryman grew even angrier, stating that students could not write political or religious figures on the board at all.
Yet football players were permitted. Classmates’ names were allowed. No restriction was placed on potentially controversial secular figures. Only religious and political figures were excluded from public acknowledgment on the board.
The cruel irony? An assignment titled “Find Your Voice” became a lesson in which voices would be silenced.
Such an agenda “should alarm every parent in America,” the ACLJ said.
And it got worse, as “after censoring students who identified conservative figures as role models, administrators at Marshall Elementary School in Eureka did something even worse: They instructed sixth-graders not to tell their parents about what happened in the classroom.”
The school, after being confronted by parents about its viewpoint discrimination, “apologized” to students by telling them they should not tell their parents about such concerns.
“This isn’t education. This is indoctrination. And it’s a direct assault on the parent-child relationship,” the legal team reported.
“By creating a forum for student expression with an assignment called ‘Find Your Voice,’ then excluding conservative political viewpoints while permitting others, Marshall Elementary engaged in textbook viewpoint discrimination,” the ACLJ reported.
School officials claimed citing Charlie Kirk or President Trump would create an “unsafe” environment or provoke disagreement, but that action is simply “an unconstitutional heckler’s veto,” the legal team said.
