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School org. wanted military to silence parents
The National School Boards Association planned to ask the Biden administration to deploy the Army National Guard and military police to school districts beset by parent protests over policies including mandatory masking and the teaching of critical race theory, an internal review has found.
The stunning request was included in a Sept. 17 draft letter to the president, but was removed from the final version by the NSBA’s then-CEO Chip Slaven, according to a report by Milwaukee law firm Michael Best & Friedrich.
The letter that was ultimately sent, on Sept. 29, was signed by Slaven and then-President Viola Garcia and argued that verbal confrontations and other incidents at local school board meetings across the US constituted “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials.”
“[T]he classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” read the letter, which went on to ask the administration to “examine appropriate enforceable actions” under a raft of legislation — including the post-9/11 Patriot Act.
Sought military aid
The letter — which precipitated an Oct. 4 order by Attorney General Merrick Garland that the FBI investigate complaints of threats against school officials from parents — caused immediate backlash from parents and Republicans in Congress.
But the original letter — drafted Sept. 17 by NSBA official Deborah Rigsby — contained a more egregious request: “[W]e ask that the Army National Guard and its Military Police be deployed to certain school districts and related events where students and school personnel have been subjected to acts and threats of violence.”
The line was too extreme for Slaven, who expressed his concern in an edited draft dated Sept. 22.
“I went back and forth on this one,” he wrote, according to the report. “I think we should leave it out for now. I am concerned it could be seen as us asking for too much of a federal intervention. However, if things start to get bad, we can revisit.”
Rigsby argued for the language to stay in, but Slaven was unmoved, writing on Sept. 24: “I’ve reviewed this section again and think it will be seen as a federal intervention into local and state issues. School districts that have this issue should be reaching out to their Governor first who can deploy State Police.”
In a separate note, Slaven had no issue with keeping the Patriot Act language, writing: “I recommend keeping it in because there is often confusion on the PATRIOT Act from the public so I thought calling it was important so there is not confusion.”
Amid the resulting backlash, the NSBA disavowed the letter the following month, saying there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
On Oct. 4, Garland ordered the FBI and US attorneys to arrange meetings with federal, state, local, tribal and territorial leaders to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” and “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”