The Letter In My Inbox
A mother in our PTA, a friend, forwarded me a letter she got from a school district attorney this week. She had filed a request to see the supplemental social-emotional learning materials her sixth-grader was being taught. The request was specific. She named the curriculum, the unit, the week, the teacher. The letter came back nine business days later. It told her that the district considered the materials proprietary, that disclosure would be made only under terms she had to agree to in advance, and that her continued requests would be evaluated under the district's harassment policy.
Read that last part again. Her continued requests would be evaluated under the harassment policy. A mother asking what her sixth-grader is being taught was being put on notice that the act of asking, again, could be classified as harassment.
The Word I Keep Coming Back To
The word I keep coming back to is contempt. There is a kind of institutional contempt that you only develop when you have stopped believing that the people you serve are the people you answer to. The district has stopped believing it. The letter said it out loud. The letter is not the policy. The letter is the proof that the policy was always going to land this way.
We trusted the system. That was our mistake. We trusted that the curriculum committee meetings, posted publicly, were the venue where the curriculum got decided. They were not. The curriculum gets decided in the meetings between district administration and the consultants who sell the supplemental materials. The committee meetings are theater. The PTA presentations are theater. The school board votes, in many cases, are theater. The decisions are made in venues that do not require public notice, by people who are not elected, on contracts whose dollar amounts are publicly summarized but whose terms of work are not.
What The Letter Was Designed To Do
The letter was designed to do three things. It was designed to slow the mother down. It was designed to introduce a financial and time cost to the act of asking. And it was designed to put her on warning that the district had legal options available to it that she does not. The district sends letters like this when it has decided that the parent is no longer a partner. The district has lawyers on retainer. The mother does not. The mother has a job, two younger children, a husband working swing shift, and about forty minutes a day of energy left after dinner.
The lawyer who signed the letter is not a bad person. The lawyer is doing what the lawyer was paid to do. The administrator who instructed the lawyer to send the letter is not a bad person either. The administrator is operating inside a system that has, over the last fifteen years, hardened into a posture where the public is the adversary and the public's children are the territory.
What Other Mothers Are Doing
I called four other mothers in our district. Three of them had received similar letters in the last six months. The pattern is not random. It is the playbook. The district has a small team of administrators who handle the letters. They are coordinating with similar teams in neighboring districts. They are using template language. The lawyers have a shared resource library. The mothers have a Facebook group. The mothers' group is bigger than the administrators' team. It is also more determined.
The Facebook group is not what the press calls a mothers' uprising or a conservative backlash. The Facebook group is mothers who got the letter, who realized that the letter was the policy, and who decided that they were not going to let the policy stand. Some of them voted for Donald Trump. Some of them did not. Most of them did not start the year thinking about education politics. They are thinking about it now.
The Curriculum The Letter Was Protecting
The mother showed me what she did manage to see of the curriculum. It was, in honest assessment, not the worst thing I have seen. It was also not what the district described in its public-facing materials. The supplemental unit, the one the letter was designed to keep her from seeing, contained material that the district had described publicly as evidence-based and trauma-informed. The material itself was a slide deck that the district had purchased from a consultancy that sold the same slide deck to two hundred and forty other districts last year. The slide deck used vocabulary that the parents in that district had not voted to introduce to their sixth-graders.
The slide deck is not the issue. The slide deck is the symptom. The issue is that the parents in the district were the last people to know what the curriculum was, and the district had structured the disclosure process so that they would be the last people to know.
What I Would Tell That Mother
I would tell that mother what I told her in the actual phone call. The letter is not the end of the story. The letter is the beginning of the public part of the story. Keep the letter. Show the letter. Share the letter. The letter is evidence. The evidence is what changes the school board election in November.
I would also tell her what I have told my own kids about hard things. The fact that something is harder than you thought it would be does not mean that you stop. It means that you are now doing the part of the work that matters. Show up to the school board meetings. Speak in the public comment period. Run for the seat if the seat is open. Bless their hearts, but the people in the room who do not want you in the room are counting on you to give up. Do not give them what they are counting on.
