A letter from the National School Boards Association to President Biden (read it here) requesting “federal law enforcement and other assistance” to protect children, educators, and school board members from “threats of violence and acts of intimidation” after a series of disturbing incidents.
After White House meetings on the issue, the Department of Justice issued a press release (read it here) saying the Attorney General “directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies” (read that memo here).
This provoked a political firestorm on the right. Conservatives took issue with the NSBA letter’s reference to “domestic terrorism” and “hate crimes.” They also objected to what they characterized as federal interference in local law enforcement and school issues.
That’s a fair and reasonable characterization of threats and violence against society’s institutions and the people who carry out their functions, and those acts are in some cases federal crimes. But the NSBA chose to back down from that phrasing after angry parents and some Republicans in Congress conflated it into a slur against parents attending school board meetings to express objections to school policies, which was never the letter’s meaning or intent and dishonestly distorts what the NSBA’s letter said.
Notably, at the same time these critics have not condemned or even criticized the threats against school board members or riotous behavior in some school board meetings that are the subject of the letter and the reason for the Biden administration’s decision to provide FBI assistance in protecting school boards. They’ve shunted those concerns aside and refused to talk about them.
The battle lines are thus drawn: Republicans are defending raucous and disruptive parent behavior; the Biden administration is committed to using federal resources to investigate and prosecute any federal crimes committed against school boards, who have sometimes to make controversial or unpopular decisions about children’s health and education, which can draw community ire.
Whether you agree or disagree with masking school children, to the extent there are legitimate questions about its necessity, I think it’s better “safe than sorry.” We know kids can get sick, seriously ill, and die from Covid-19, because some have. The pandemic isn’t over; there’s still community transmission. And schools are a major transmission mechanism.
Michael Lewis, in his book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story (available here), explains why it’s so important to close schools during Covid-19 surges, and require masks at other times: Schools are people concentrators (see photo at left); nowhere else in American society are so many people so densely packed together.
The other big issue is teaching about racial inequality and injustice. “Critical race theory” describes an academic framework for study of these issues in graduate schools, but partisans are using the term to describe teaching kids that blacks have historically been disadvantaged in our society. This isn’t surprising given the Republican Party’s evolution into a white supremacist party, which began under Nixon, continued under Reagan, and dramatically accelerated under Trump.
People can and will disagree about classroom Covid-19 policies and educational issues, and the federal government’s role, but the line between peaceful expression and disruptive or threatening behavior isn’t blurry. This blog supports Biden’s and Garland’s approach to the threats and violence against school boards; we cannot allow our country to descend into mob rule.
On this blog, school policies are debatable, but comments defending violence or harassment won’t be posted.
Although the focus of this posting is school boards, a similar problem is occurring at election offices, which in some places are losing essential election workers who feel the job isn’t worth facing anger, threats, and danger of physical harm to themselves and their families. We’re on a path toward a lawless society ruled by violence. Because it’s a multi-state problem, it’s a federal responsibility.