Using Your Power to Hold Local School Boards Accountable
What is the one emotion that so many of you felt during the biggest part of 2020 through 2021?
For me, I felt helpless. Helpless to stop the overreach from our State and Local officials, especially our School Board.
I watched as our School Board publicly voted in the summer of 2021 for a mask optional policy just to reverse it for the buses the Friday before school began. This was based on our school’s insurance company statement that they may not cover the cost of ensuing litigation if we did not follow the Center’s for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommendation that masks be worn on school buses, which they considered public transportation. However, this was not applicable to our state because Ohio Revised Code clearly states that school buses are not public transportation. There were many school districts who interpreted this correctly and did not require masks on buses.
I watched as our local School Board officials operated as an arm of the local Health Department by issuing quarantine letters with the department’s letterhead, which were in contradiction of the Ohio Revised Code (ORC).
I watched as School Board officials implemented the Health Department guidelines that were in open violation of ORC thus potentially opening our district up to violating the code.
Despite my testimony at our school board meetings where I voiced these concerns, our board members chose to maintain course. I was not alone. There were hundreds of parents across the state experiencing the same concerns and violations. Many attempted to find a lawyer who would help them. Some were successful and moved ahead with suing their districts. Many were not as they either could not find a lawyer to take their case, or those who were taking cases could not take additional ones and in many instances the attorney fees were not affordable.
Ultimately, there is nothing worse than feeling helpless because you think you cannot stand your ground and fight back without a lawyer or legal team due to cost constraints. Let’s be honest, school districts have large legal teams with deep pockets. They also tend to be risk adverse, which I completely understand. After all, that is the purpose of their lawyers – to keep the school districts from doing anything that would open them up to liability and a lawsuit.
Fortunately, each one of us has the power to hold our elected state and local officials accountable and ensure they uphold their Oath of Office, adhere to the U.S. and State Constitutions and operate within Federal, State and local laws, as well as their own Board policies.
Over the next several weeks, we will be providing information on how to do this using their surety bonds. We will teach you what a surety bond is, who is required to have them, how to secure a copy of them, how to file a claim and ultimately hold them accountable without spending thousands of dollars in legal fees. We will provide example documents you can use along with links to various sites for not only these documents but Ohio law. Anyone can learn to do this and teach others to do the same.
As Glinda the Good Witch once said, “You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.”