In response to the Republicans’ controversial parental rights bill, House Democrats plan to introduce alternative legislation Friday that will call for “inclusive” schools and oppose efforts to censor curriculum.

Led by Oregon Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, the resolution follows Wednesday’s marathon education committee session, which stretched 16 hours into Thursday morning and further clarified the partisan split over parents’ role in their children’s education. 

While the GOP’s approach emphasizes accommodating parents’ requests for information, the Democrats’ version focuses on ensuring schools provide a high-quality education and don’t discriminate against students. 

Republicans say their , which passed 25 to 17 and now moves to the full House, would increase transparency into curriculum, school funding and safety efforts. But Bonamici said during the committee meeting that it has “discriminatory undertones,” because parents could use it to remove materials about topics they oppose, and would “pit parents and families against their kids’ teachers and schools.” 

For a month, her staff has worked with the National PTA, the National Parents Union, an advocacy group, and others on the Democratic “Bill of Rights for Students and Parents.” The resolution says “students benefit from opportunities to learn in diverse, well-funded … schools alongside peers who have had different life experiences” and calls for schools to use materials that are “historically accurate” and “reflect the powerful diversity of the nation.”

The passionate debate this week, which at times turned argumentative, was likely a preview of what’s to come in the full House. Democrats characterized the bill as an effort to weaken public education and micromanage how schools operate. Republicans, however, said schools have silenced parents, excluded them from discussions of their children’s gender identity and prioritized teachers unions’ demands during the pandemic.

“This bill is about one simple and fundamental principle — parents should always have a seat at the table,” said Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow, lead author of the Republicans’ bill. “Rather than opening the doors to welcome parents as partners, [schools] would rather slam them shut and have government bureaucrats make all the decisions.”

Along those lines, the House Judiciary Committee is investigating a past incident that contributed to why the GOP thinks such legislation is needed. On Monday, committee Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio former leaders of the National School Boards Association to revisit the controversy surrounding a September 2021 letter asking for federal law enforcement’s help in addressing threats of violence against school officials. 

Republicans argue the letter prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to in assessing whether some parents — angry about school closures, masking and curriculum issues — posed a threat. The association .

Democrats said school districts were never trying to stifle parents’ legitimate concerns. They argued Wednesday that the Republicans’ Parents Bill of Rights is unnecessary because states and districts already have policies in place that allow for and welcome parent input. 

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx, New York, teacher and principal, described past situations when parents were uncomfortable with books taught in a course. He met with them and they opted to remove their children from those lessons. 

“Us sitting here, having this conversation is a waste of taxpayer time and money,” he said. “We are dealing with an issue that is already on the books.”

Other Democrats asked the majority how such a law would be enforced and whether it would lead to withholding funds from schools if there’s a violation.

Debate over curriculum

Members of both parties introduced a wide array of amendments that would significantly expand the bill — topics ranging from cyberbullying and teacher pay to third-grade reading and charging parents fees for copies of curriculum. Two of the 30 amendments Democrats proposed were accepted, one that supports all students having internet access and another prohibiting the federal government from getting involved in curriculum and school administration issues. All 15 of the Republicans’ amendments passed. 

An amendment from New York Republican Brandon Williams, which says it’s important for schools to teach students about the Holocaust, was among those approved. But Republicans rejected amendments from Democrats that would prevent schools from excluding Black, Latino, LGBTQ and Asian American/Pacific Islander history, saying that the federal government has no place in curriculum. Democrats called it a double standard.

“It is highly hypocritical that the argument can be made for the history that affects you and your family yet the history that affects me and my family is unwanted, unaccepted and oftentimes offensive on this committee,” said Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut, a one-time National Teacher of the Year. “If we are in fact saying that the federal government has no place in dictating curriculum, either we teach it all or we don’t teach anything.”

Democrats opposed other amendments that they said target transgender students, including one from Rep. Bob Good of Virgina that would require schools to notify parents if their student’s gender identity is inconsistent with their sex assigned at birth. 

“We have legislators who want to make trans kids a problem in this country,” said Rep, Primala Jayapal of Washington, who has a trans daughter. “Stop doing this to our kids.”

During the same meeting, the committee passed that would prohibit students identified male at birth from competing in girls sports.

‘More bureaucratic requirements’

Despite the committee devoting so much time to parental rights, some experts note that there’s no legal basis for the Republicans’ law in the first place because education is a state matter and is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

“This is not constitutional and would mainly create more bureaucratic requirements, not truly empower parents,” said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. 

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, who worked with Bonamici on the resolution, said parents could use such a bill to tie educators’ hands by suing in federal court.

“It’s going to make it incredibly messy for anything to happen in classrooms at all, because literally everything will be challenged,” she said. 

At the same time, she said Bonamici’s resolution would better define a high-quality education and offer a legal recourse for parents when states don’t adequately fund schools.

“The only way we have ever started down the path toward equity in education in large-scale, meaningful ways has been when parents have been able to sue for justice in federal court,” she said, naming desegregation cases Brown v. Board of Education and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education as examples. “We need to strengthen our federal laws to continue down that path.”

McCluskey said Republicans could more productively spend their time focusing on school choice, adding that states have made “great strides” in passing education savings accounts. Other parent advocates would like to see the federal government guarantee students a high-quality education, but argue the debate over parents’ rights misses the mark.

“Both parties have swung and missed on post-pandemic parent empowerment,” said Ben Austin, founder of Education Civil Rights Now, which has been working in states to pass laws requiring students to receive a high-quality education. “Transparency is necessary, but it’s far from sufficient. Just because [parents] can see a budget doesn’t mean [they] can do anything about it.”

But censuring a board member for criticism of the board violates that person’s First Amendment rights and has “significant chilling effects,” responded Michael Kimberly, attorney for former trustee David Buren Wilson, who sued the system after he was censured.

During their questioning in Houston Community College System v. Wilson, the justices asked whether there should be limits to censure. Justices Clarence Thomas and Elena Kagan asked if censure can include fines or even imprisonment. But Richard Morris, attorney for the community college system — and for hundreds of school boards in Texas — said he didn’t think incarcerating a member for something they said was “within the history and tradition of this country.”

Chief Justice John Roberts asked Kimberly whether agreeing with Wilson would open the door to lawsuits. 

“If you prevail, then whenever there’s a censure resolution, the response is going to be a lawsuit against the board for defamation, libel, and that would then go to the courts and they would have to resolve that,” he said.

While the case pertains to a community college, it’s impact is likely to be far broader. It is playing out as school board members across the country confront multiple divisive issues, from requiring masks to teaching students about racial discrimination. While boards this year have faced public protests and sometimes verbal and physical over their positions, disputes among members — sometimes — are happening as well. The court’s decision could limit efforts to rein in members who use social media or other platforms to air complaints against the board. Supporters of the community college board, including the , argue that a ruling for Wilson could bring the actions of elected boards “squarely within the purview of federal district courts, crippling a public body’s ability to self-govern.” But free speech advocates argue elected boards can go too far.

“Sometimes when the government speaks, it can violate First Amendment rights,” said Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. He said a broad ruling by the court in favor of the college system “could impact decision-making both in higher ed, K-12 and beyond.”

Wilson, who has long been at odds with his fellow board members, served from 2013 to 2019, and could return to the board if he is victorious in a Nov. 2 election. In 2017, he disagreed with the board’s decision to fund a campus in Qatar. In protest, he programmed robocalls to constituents of other trustees, went on local radio stations to discredit them and hired a private agency to investigate their actions, according to court documents. He also launched a website to publicize his concerns. 

In , the college system said its rebuke “does not suppress or impermissibly chill the member’s own speech, compel him to espouse the majority’s views, or prevent him from doing his legislative job. The circumstances here thus provide no basis for a First Amendment claim.” 

But David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which co-authored a “friend of the court” brief in support of Wilson, said even if his behavior was “extremely obnoxious,” the censure crossed the line because it tried to control what he was saying outside of his official duties. 

The board of trustees “viewed him as a gadfly, but that doesn’t mean gadflies aren’t right about some things,” Keating said.

Wilson’s brief argued that the board made unwise decisions regarding its partnership with Qatar and had a “history of corruption” that resulted in pleading guilty to bribery and serving time in federal prison.

‘The criticisms of government’

Keating added it wasn’t just the trustees’ censure resolution that infringed on Wilson’s rights — it was the additional penalties attached to it. The censure made Wilson ineligible for board officer positions, cut off reimbursements for college-related travel and required him to seek approval before accessing funds in his faculty account. 

Those penalties received considerable attention at Tuesday’s hearing. In its ruling, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Wilson had a First Amendment claim because the censure itself reprimanded him for speaking out on an issue of “public concern” — not because it included penalties. But the justices wanted to know why they shouldn’t also consider those sanctions.

Morris argued that prohibiting a body from using censure would have a “destabilizing” impact and that even private citizens “have to be able to endure the criticisms of government.”

The college system holds that the public — not the courts — should weigh in on disputes between elected officials at the ballot box.

“As with all political speech, the ultimate audience is the people,” their brief said. “Disputes like the one between respondent Wilson and his legislative colleagues must be resolved by the voters.”

Some recent conflicts between board members involve the same COVID-related issues or racial equity initiatives — linked to the umbrella of critical race theory — that are prompting public demonstrations and shouting matches. In a Texas district, for example, there is two members who left a September meeting because of social distancing rules that limited the number of people who could attend.

In , board member Jeff Church, who is facing censure, sees parallels between the Houston case and his of the board and the district. 

“Theoretically, I may not be losing tangible benefits, but the free speech issue remains,” he said.

According to board President Angela Taylor, Church has , including spreading misleading information and communicating with constituents by email without copying her.

Church, a conservative who opposes what he labels “outrageous so-called social justice education,” the district’s policies are “so vague that you can censure a ham sandwich.” 

But Joy Baskin, director of legal services for the Texas Association of School Boards, said censure protects the rest of the board’s free speech rights. If the 5th Circuit court’s ruling stands, “boards will be so afraid of litigation that they will stay away from what should be course correction,” she said.

Some experts anticipate the court will issue a limited ruling. Ethan Ashley, co-CEO of School Board Partners, which trains and supports “equity-minded” board members, said he expects the justices to be “sensitive to the concerns of speech that can impede a board’s ability to operate,” such as leaking confidential information discussed in an executive session.

But it’s important for board members to be able to “voice their own opinions in order to hold the system accountable, especially if the needs of their constituents have been perpetually minimized,” he said. 

Keating said a legislative body is akin to a workplace, where there are expectations for behavior. But he added that whether members should be censured for what they say or do outside of official proceedings is a more difficult question.

“This case has enough variables and moving parts that it’s really hard to predict what sort of guidance might come out of this,” he said.

“You better grow eyes in the back of your head,” she said one person wrote in an email. “You’re going down,” wrote another.

Toy-Dragoni said the vitriol began to intensify after the pandemic shuttered classes at the Pennsbury School District in Bucks County. What began as anger over school closures and mask mandates quickly turned — amid national pushback to critical race theory — to outrage over the district’s diversity and equity efforts. A barrage of hateful and violent emails left Toy-Dragoni, the school board president, feeling harassed and threatened, including by people who lived in other states.

“It’s unnerving because someone is saying they want nothing but harm to come to you and they’re emailing you 30 times about it,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. “You start to think ‘Well, how long are they going to wait for this harm to come to me?’”

As public education leaders from across the country come forward with stories about receiving death threats amid political strife over the pandemic and classroom lessons on systemic racism, a partisan feud has coalesced around the free-speech rights of infuriated parents. In a recent letter, the National School Boards Association warned of an “immediate threat” against school leaders and called on the Biden administration to clamp down on what it referred to as “domestic terrorism.” In a follow-up memo, Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed federal law enforcement to create a plan to combat a “disturbing spike” in threats against school board members. Republican lawmakers and conservative advocacy groups, meanwhile, have accused the Biden administration of stifling frustrated parents in violation of the First Amendment. 

The issue has highlighted a tension between ensuring school board members are safe while protecting the free-speech rights of aggrieved citizens.

Because of the Justice Department memo, parents are afraid to speak up at school board meetings due to a “poisonous chilling effect,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said during a Senate hearing Wednesday. And while the national school boards group has since used in its letter, Garland didn’t back down on efforts to investigate what he called an increase in violent threats against educators and other public servants. 

As the Senate hearing was underway, activists held a rally outside the national school board group’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.

A spokesperson for the national school boards group declined to comment. Several state school boards groups, including the one in Pennsylvania, over the issue.

“It’s a rising tide of threats of violence against judges, against prosecutors, against secretaries of state, against election administrators, against doctors, against protesters, against news reporters,” Garland said. “That’s the reason we responded as quickly as we did.”

A ‘true threat?’

The Constitution doesn’t guarantee “a dialectical free-for-all,” and the Supreme Court has long held that true threats of violence are not constitutionally protected speech, said Clay Calvert, the director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. But the issue at hand, he said, isn’t “black and white.”

“There’s a difference between how we colloquially think of a threat versus the legal standards for what really is a threat, which are going to be much higher,” he said. 

Parents have a First Amendment right to criticize government employees through offensive speech, he said, and officials must analyze on a case-by-case basis whether someone’s speech goes beyond protected dialogue.

“A true threat is a statement that would place a person in fear of imminent bodily harm or death,” he said, but does not include “political hyperbole.” In a 1969 case, the Supreme Court who was arrested after he said that if he were drafted into the Vietnam War and forced to carry a rifle, “the first man I want to get in my sights” is then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. The statement was crude political hyperbole rather than a true threat, the court ruled. The line between true threats and hyperbole, Calvert said, are not always clear and the Supreme Court has yet to offer a concrete definition. He said that police often err on the side of silencing speakers in the interest of public safety and debating the issue in court later.

Meanwhile, police departments are “always walking the tightrope” when investigating whether someone’s statements go beyond those permitted by the Constitution, said attorney John Driscoll, a former New York City police officer who served 11 years as head of the NYPD Captains Endowment Association. Officers are in charge of preventing immediate threats and most departments employ legal experts who determine whether someone broke the law, he said.

“You can voice your opinion, even if you’re the only one who thinks that way, but you don’t have the right to physically threaten and intimidate people,” said Driscoll, who taught constitutional law at NYC’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He said the tense political environment has made it more difficult for officers to do their jobs. “Because of social media, the schism in the country has gotten a lot more extreme on both sides. There doesn’t seem to be too much moderation and police, as usual, are stuck in the middle trying to navigate this and protect people at the same time.”

But Toy-Dragoni, the Pennsylvania school board president, said the statements she’s faced reached the bar of being considered death threats and were clearly designed to incite intimidation. Among the messages, she was warned to “sleep with one eye open,” and that “we will never stop until you are done.”

“It’s a level of hate, it sets you on edge,” she said. “But did they straight up say ‘Next week I’m going to kill you?’ No. But I’ve never heard of anyone saying that to anyone ever, even when they do get killed by that person.”

Threats reported nationwide

The messages delivered to Toy-Dragoni are part of a national trend. School board members have reported receiving threatening letters, being followed and screamed at in board meetings. 

After Las Vegas school district employees were mandated to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, the school board president saying she should be hanged or shot. In New Jersey, two board members in the mail with their photos in the crosshairs of a gun.

Sami Al-Abdrabbuh, chair of the Corvallis Board of Education in Oregon, also highlighted several incidents this year that he perceived as death threats. On the same day his campaign sign was discovered at a local shooting range with bullet holes, he said a man showed up outside his friend’s house and asked “Where is Sami? I want to kill him and I’m going to kill you if you don’t tell me where he is.”

Local police were notified of the incident but have not arrested a suspect, Al-Abdrabbuh told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, and a friend who served in the Navy helped him develop a safety plan.

“Make sure, before you leave the house, look from the window and make sure you can go to your car,” he said. “Before I enter my house I have a way to make sure nothing has been tampered.”

Protests in other communities have grown so raucous that they prevented school boards from conducting official business. That energy and activism is being harnessed by conservatives and Republicans, particularly Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glen Youngkin, who has with Democrat Terry McAuliffe in next week’s election.

In , Calvert of the University of Florida called public comments at government functions like school board meetings “perhaps the purest form of citizen political expression” â€” the precise speech the First Amendment sought to protect. The Constitution doesn’t enshrine a public platform before school boards and other public bodies and they can impose certain rules so long as they’re “content neutral” and apply to all speakers evenly. For example, “time, place and manner” restrictions can limit how long speakers occupy the podium and can prohibit people from restricting government bodies from carrying out business. 

“Interrupting does nobody any good,” Calvert said. “It’s the heckler’s veto notion that the audience should not have the ability to heckle or drown out the speaker.”

During Wednesday’s Senate hearing, Republican lawmakers repeatedly noted a concern that the Justice Department memo could have a chilling effect on parents’ free-speech rights and that federal intervention was unnecessary. Those concerns mirrored a letter from 17 state attorneys general earlier this month, accusing the Biden administration of “seeking to criminalize lawful dissent and intimidate parents into silence” in violation of the First Amendment.

Garland maintained that his memo only focused on threats and violence and drew a clear distinction between such messages and constitutionally protected speech. 

“It makes absolutely clear in the first paragraph that spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution,” he told lawmakers. “That includes debate by parents criticizing school boards.” 

Education activist Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, said it’s important for parents to remain engaged and they must not shy away from making themselves heard at school board meetings. In just the last six weeks, Rodrigues has attended a dozen school board meetings across the country where parents didn’t focus on mask mandates or critical race theory. Instead, she said they were concerned about unreliable school transportation and food shortages in cafeterias. Yet those voices, she said, are being drowned out by “people who are behaving badly and who are exercising their anger in ways that are really unproductive.” 

“Parents have really deep, serious concerns about what is happening right now with our kids that have nothing to do with the culture war,” she said. “Parents are showing up to have that conversation but it’s sexier to show white parents that are losing their minds at a microphone. It’s heartbreaking because we have real, serious and sober work to do to help our kids recover from this pandemic.”

For Toy-Dragoni, parent outrage during the pandemic forced her to reconsider her place in education policy. She said she sought her seat on the school board because she’s a mother who wanted to create additional afterschool activities in her community but will no longer serve on the board after this year. She decided not to run for reelection after the pandemic prompted parental uproar in her community. But now, after the situation has gotten even worse, she said she regrets the decision to step aside. 

“Having gone through all of this, I would have run again so that they wouldn’t feel like they ran me out of town,” she said. “This is 100 percent part of a national agenda to get decent people out of local office by making it absolutely miserable for them.”

“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland wrote in a media release Monday. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”

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The move comes less than a week after the 90,000-member National School Boards Association urged the Biden administration to act swiftly to protect public school leaders who face “an immediate threat” of violence as school board meetings nationwide grow increasingly volatile. The group cited more than 20 instances of threats, harassment and intimidation during board meetings in recent months amid tension over mask mandates and classroom instruction on critical race theory. The school board group referred to the violent threats as “domestic terrorism.”

In , Garland called on the federal agencies to meet with local law enforcement in the next month to create a plan to combat the “disturbing spike.” The Justice Department also announced plans to create a new task force focused on prosecuting people who threaten school leaders. The task force will include the FBI and the Justice Department’s criminal, security and civil rights divisions.

Officials also said they would create training resources that help school boards and administrators understand behaviors that constitute threats, how to report dangerous conduct to police and how to preserve relevant evidence.

Chip Slavin, the school board group’s interim executive director, said in a media release that the Justice Department’s response sent “a strong message to individuals with violent intent who are focused on causing chaos, disrupting our public schools and driving wedges between school boards and the parents, students and communities they serve.”

In one recent incident, police arrested an Illinois man for allegedly hitting a school official as he was being escorted out of a board meeting and, in another, an Ohio school board member received a letter in the mail warning threatening that she would “pay dearly” for requiring students to wear masks on campus. While some speakers have used board meetings to spread conspiracy theories and hate speech, other critics who frequently clash with their school boards to the national association’s assertion that their actions constitute “domestic terrorism.” Among them is activist and former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, who tweeted that the school board group should apologize to parents.

Conservative lawmakers and activists, including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, were quick to accuse officials of trampling on the free speech rights of parents who speak up at school board meetings. On Twitter, the Biden administration of using “federal law enforcement to punish dissent from the ruling class.”

Read the Justice Department memo here:

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In , the National School Boards Association said the country’s schools and educators are “under an immediate threat” and urged the federal government to “investigate, intercept and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against public school officials through existing statutes,” including the Gun-Free School Zones Act and the PATRIOT Act. The group called for a “joint collaboration” between local and federal law enforcement agencies to halt what it referred to as “domestic terrorism” carried out at school board meetings, through the U.S. Postal Service and on social media.

“As the threats grow and news of extremist hate organizations showing up at school board meetings is being reported, this is a critical time for a proactive approach to deal with this difficult time,” which includes tumult around mask mandates and classroom instruction on critical race theory. The group cited more than 20 instances of threats, harassment and intimidation during school board meetings that targeted education officials in recent months.

“Coupled with attacks against school board members and educators for approving policies for masks to protect the health and safety of students and school employees, many public school officials are also facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter.

School board meetings have become ground zero for political unrest in recent months as conservative groups and former Trump administration officials have against school officials as a campaign strategy. Though news articles have highlighted outrage that include divisive and at times violent rhetoric, it’s unclear if any education leaders have been injured.

In one incident, on aggravated battery and disorderly conduct charges for allegedly hitting a school official as he was being escorted out of a school board meeting. In Ohio, a school board member was mailed a letter that warned “we are coming after you” and threatened that the school official would “pay dearly” for requiring students to wear masks. In a recent story for ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, school leaders discussed how they faced online threats and vandalized campuses. Candace Singh, who leads a school district near San Diego, said she was threatened with warnings like “You better watch out” and “Watch your back.” Such language, she said, has become “accepted in the public discourse, where it never would have been tolerated before.” Some districts, like the Rockwood School District in suburban St. Louis, resorted to hiring private security earlier this year to protect staff.

Earlier in the month, the National Association of Secondary School Principals to “do more to protect school leaders from rampant hostility and violence that disrupts our schools and threatens the safety of our educators and students.”

In , the school boards association and AASA, The School Superintendents Association, called on the public to stop using violent threats to express their opinions about pandemic-era school reopening decisions.

“We oppose the increasingly aggressive tactics creeping into board and community meetings, and we cannot let frustrations and tensions evolve into name calling and intimidation,” Daniel Domenech, AASA’s executive director, said in the statement. “We will never back down from the importance of freedom of speech, but we cannot — and will not — tolerate aggression, intimidation, threats and violence toward superintendents, board members and educators.”