Philly suburban school district to pay $300k for "censoring" anti-CRT speakers

[DrBanneker]

This is in a school district near me, Pennsbury in Bucks County about 30 minutes north of Philly. Frankly, those school districts are getting some weird MAGA fever. The other district north of it, Central Bucks, has a school board member now that has ties to an organization with ties to the Three Percenters and are now pushing book banning codes that allow bans on books, even before they have arrived, by the board or community members (article here).

Anyway, in Pennsbury, there was a big blow up last March, and I remember this happening since I knew a White lady that went to the board meetings. Basically board meetings last year were in her words all about "racism or anti-maskers". A few of the speakers against the Pennsbury Districts diversity and equity initiatives went so far that the district sent letters to parents apologizing for their tirades and striking them from the video recordings.

Subsequent anti-CRT rants were halted. Because they had been stopped from speaking and removed from the video recording they sued with a right wing legal foundation called the Institute for Free Speech and a local private law firm. The plaintiffs won, but the plaintiffs themselves only received $17.91 each (to represent 1791 when the Bill of Rights was codified). The IFS got almost $300k in legal fees.

Yes, I get that governments can't prohibit speech but there is a difference between banning speech and controlling public meetings. And the same people suing seem to not have a problem with boards banning books (aka Freedom of the Press).

So just prepare yourselves. these school board meetings are just going to get nuttier since now there is a precedence where a school district is out of pocket over a quarter million for not letting people say whatever offensive thing they want about race in board meetings. Oh, I also need to mention the school board president got death and rape threats after this started going down last year.


Article is here but I am pasting it below. @Leasy come on out to Bucks

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The Pennsbury School District agrees to $300,000 settlement of lawsuit over four men’s curtailed public comments

The men, who sued the district and school board in October, argued they had been illegally censored by the district. The district said some of their comments were "abusive" and "coded."

www.inquirer.com

The Pennsbury School District agrees to $300,000 settlement of lawsuit over four men’s curtailed public comments​

The men, who sued the district and school board in October, argued they had been illegally censored by the district. The district said some of their comments were "abusive" and "coded."

The Pennsbury School District has agreed to a $300,000 settlement of a lawsuit by four men whose public comments were curtailed.
The agreement, approved by the school board Thursday night, follows a federal judge’s order in November that directed the Bucks County district to stop enforcing its policy prohibiting abusive, offensive, or personally directed public comments — deeming it a likely violation of the First Amendment.
“School boards across the country should take note. Rules for public comments must respect the First Amendment rights of speakers. If you are limiting which opinions may be shared, you’ll be held liable for violating First Amendment rights,” said Alan Gura, vice president for litigation at the Institute for Free Speech, a Washington-based nonprofit that represented residents Douglas Marshall, Simon Campbell, Robert Abrams, and Tim Daly in a lawsuit.
Under the agreement, the district’s insurance carrier will pay $300,000 in attorneys’ fees, as well as $17.91 to each of the men — a “symbolic payment” referring to 1791, the year the First Amendment was ratified, the institute said.

The board approved the agreement without any discussion Thursday.

“All of the named parties agree the matter is best resolved by mutual agreement,” board president TR Kannan said in a statement. “Pennsbury’s No. 1 focus has been, and will always be, the students of our district. The Pennsbury community is better for the actions we have taken today.”
The men, who sued the district and school board in October, argued they had been illegally censored by the district, including while questioning its equity initiatives — a heated topic last year in a number of communities around the region, as angry parents turned out at school board meetings.

During a school board meeting last March, Marshall spoke about his view of the history of racial problems in the country while objecting to the district’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The board later cut his remarks from a video recording of the meeting — stating “the comments escalated from expressing a viewpoint to expressing beliefs and ideas that were abusive and coded in racist terms, also known as ‘dog whistles.’ ”

Two months later, following a presentation on the district’s equity efforts, Daly, Marshall, and Abrams were all cut off while making separate comments. The district’s assistant solicitor, who dismissed their remarks as misrepresentative of the district’s equity program and irrelevant, shouted at each man: “You’re done!”
And the month after that — in an episode that went viral online — Campbell, a former Pennsbury school board member, castigated the board as “snowflakes” and referred to its then-president as “School Board President Benito Mussolini.” The district’s solicitor interrupted Campbell to warn he would be “asked to step away” if he made more personally directed comments. (The board’s president later said she received death and rape threats as Campbell’s speech garnered national attention.)

In her November order, U.S. District Court Judge Gene Pratter said that while she was not addressing whether the men’s speech was offensive, “suffice it to say that the First Amendment protects offensive speakers.” The district’s conduct, she said, amounted to “impermissible viewpoint discrimination.”

The policy Pennsbury invoked in cutting off the comments was based on a model policy written by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association that many area school boards had adopted, and that some district lawyers recommended they suspend. The association said it was reviewing its policy in the wake of Pratter’s order.
Pennsbury, meanwhile, has rewritten its public comment policy and cut ties with its former solicitor, according to the Institute for Free Speech, which is also representing members of the Moms for Liberty group in a case against the public schools in Brevard County, Fla.
The institute will receive $237,590 under the Pennsbury settlement, while a Norristown-based firm also representing the men, Vangrossi & Rechuitti, will receive $62,410, according to the agreement.

 

[get these nets]

Wild story. This CRT bogeyman is goose that lays golden eggs for those people.

 

[Leasy]

When people say Philly is in a state of Alabama they are not lying. Bucks county is one of the most racist counties around Philly. It’s basically a Republican stronghold with backward cacs and this doesn’t surprised me. I expect to see more of this coming

 

[DrBanneker]

When people say Philly is in a state of Alabama they are not lying. Bucks county is one of the most racist counties around Philly. It’s basically a Republican stronghold with backward cacs and this doesn’t surprised me. I expect to see more of this coming

You ever see the Trump Store on Street Rd. in Bensalem. LOL, dude has a whole business on that shyt and I think he is still going because people still buy those Trump-Pence signs.

 

[ORDER_66]

Racism has literally costed cacs since the inception of this country til today they have gone into literal debt by fukking over black folks literally but racism & ignorance is more important than the air they breathe. Insanity...

 

[voltronblack]

Racism has literally costed cacs since the inception of this country til today they have gone into literal debt by fukking over black folks literally but racism & ignorance is more important than the air they breathe. Insanity...

Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Economist Found $16 Trillion When She Tallied Cost of Racial Bias​

Dana Peterson, who was a Citigroup global economist, recalled her own experiences of bigotry while researching how gaps between Black and White Americans eat into economic output.
Sifting through granular data such as student loan debt and occupation breakdowns by race—information that is usually the preserve of think tanks and academics, rather than Wall Street economists—Peterson said that inequities exist at every juncture, be it when Black Ivy League graduates are paid less than White counterparts or the struggles Black business owners face when trying to secure investment from venture capitalists. By her calculations, an additional 6.1 million jobs a year and $13 trillion in business revenue could have been generated over the last two decades if Black entrepreneurs had fair and equitable access to credit. “At all these different levels of society and achievement, there are these roadblocks,” Peterson says. “It’s pyramidal.”


Over the course of her research, Peterson said she was most struck by an analysis conducted by the Urban Institute on the gap in home ownership rates. The nonprofit said that after accounting for differences in income, education, credit score, and marital status, 17% of the difference between Black and White households remained unaccounted for. “That was shocking—that potentially one in five rejections alone might be attributable to bias or racism,” Peterson says. Equitable access to home loans could have resulted in 770,000 additional Black homeowners since 2000, with combined sales and expenditures adding $218 billion to gross domestic product, she concluded in her report.


Peterson calculated that by closing the various gaps between Blacks and Whites, the U.S. could stand to gain an additional $5 trillion in economic activity over the next five years—not an insignificant number as the U.S. struggles to recover from the downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Citigroup’s report comes at a time when the Federal Reserve is paying increasing attention to the plight of Black Americans and other minorities who have disproportionately been negatively affected during the pandemic. The presidents of the Atlanta, Boston, and Minneapolis reserve banks have pledged to add minority voices to compilation of the central bank’s Beige Book report, which highlights the views of businesses and corporate chiefs in each district.

Additional groups have also tallied the economic costs of racism. Altarum, a nonprofit in Ann Arbor, Mich., said two years ago that the U.S. could realize an $8 trillion gain in gross domestic product by 2050 by closing racial equity gaps. A McKinsey & Co. report that was published last year projected that the racial wealth gap will cost the U.S. economy as much as $1.5 trillion from 2019 to 2028, because of its dampening effect on consumption and investment. “Showing the impact of inequities is important because disparate audiences have different motivations, and we think it’s important to show the impact on the economy,” says Shelley Stewart III, a McKinsey partner who was one of the report’s authors.