Tim Kaine’s advice to local school systems in Harrisonburg and Albemarle County under fire from the Trump administration over DEI: lawyer up.
“When Congress has assigned monies to schools, I don’t think the president can unilaterally make up the rules about whether they get them or not. So, the first thing is, as in many of the president’s executive words and actions, these will end up in courts,” Sen. Kaine, D-Va., said in a conference call on Thursday.
“My sense is, any school district, anybody, any agency, school district, any federal employee receiving one of these, you know, flurry of executive orders, should, you know, the school districts have legal counsel, they should get legal counsel from the school board attorney about what, in fact, they should do,” Kaine said.
This is life in Trump 2.0 America, where we need to be prepared to relitigate basic human decency.
The latest in this sphere flows from when our feckless president put his Sharpie to an executive order with the Orwellian title “Ending Racial Indoctrination in K-12 schooling” last month, and his stooges attached to it a “fact sheet” citing purported examples of “racial indoctrination” that included one-sided versions of stories involving Harrisonburg and Albemarle County.
AFP staff writer Rebecca Barnabi has reported extensively on the matter involving Harrisonburg Schools cited in the “fact sheet,” which made the claim that “Harrisonburg City Public Schools in Virginia implemented a policy forcing teachers to ‘always use a student’s preferred names and pronouns’ while using different ones with their parents.”
ICYMI
This characterization is straight from the perspective of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented three teachers who alleged that administration had given them a directive to use pronouns requested by students at school, but to lie to parents about the pronouns being used.
This Alliance Defending Freedom group is a doozy – the Southern Poverty Law Center defines ADF, founded in 1994 by a group of far-right Christian Nationalists, as a hate group, citing ADF’s advocacy for “recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad” and “state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad,” and its contention that “LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia.”
Woo, boy.
According to Harrisonburg Schools Superintendent Dr. Michael Richards, the teachers who went to the ADF to bring legal action took the portion of an optional training program for teachers and staff on how to protect students, including LGBTQ students, out of context.
The training contained guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association on how to keep students safe.
Richards said the training was presented when Virginia expanded anti-harassment laws to include transgender. Harrisonburg Schools followed and also expanded its definition of harassment, and provided guidance on how not to discriminate.
“We provided state-of-the-art guidance on that,” he said.
Teachers are encouraged to rely on their mental health team if a consultation is necessary with a student and to communicate with the student’s family, Richards said.
The school system guided teachers to ask students for preferred pronouns and to use their preferred pronouns.
“I rely on the kindness of our teachers to support students. I don’t have to mandate kindness,” Richards said.
After two years legal back-and-forth, the teachers who had brought suit accepted accommodations and dropped their suit.
Go figure that this Alliance Defending Freedom outfit was also involved in the matter in Albemarle County, with a suit challenging the school board’s decision to implement an anti-racism policy in 2019, claiming that the policy “defined students by their race, sought to ‘expose whiteness,’ and taught students that endorsing a concept like ‘colorblindness’ or taking the wrong position on school funding is racist and leads to lynching and genocide.”
A group of families went to ADF to file the suit against the county school system in 2021, and lost at every step on the legal ladder – their suit was dismissed with prejudice in Albemarle County Circuit Court, and the Virginia Court of Appeals and Virginia Supreme Court upheld the lower-court ruling, finding that the families had not shown that they were actually harmed by the anti-racism policy.
The final word on the case came from the ruling of the Virginia Court of Appeals.
“Perhaps the policy and curriculum could lead to a future circumstance where ACPS treats an individual student differently based on their race or religion – but at this point the concern is only speculative,” the appeals panel said.
Both cases are examples of being too clever by half – trying to make efforts to standardize basic human decency as somehow infringing on the rights of people who want their rights to be closed-minded bigots to be preserved.
ICYMI
- Charlottesville, Albemarle County departments navigate Trump’s assault on DEI programs
- Jason Miyares signs on to letter threatening Costco with suit over Trump DEI policies
- Hegseth, wink-wink, finds another Bragg to name an Army fort after
That Trump would sign his name to a document that puts him in the corner of the bigots is hardly a surprise.
“The president is afraid of diversity, for some reason,” Kaine said. “I don’t know why the president is afraid of inclusion. For some reason, I don’t know why, the president seems to be afraid of equity. Not private equity. I mean, he really loves private equity. He just seems to be afraid of public equity. I don’t know why.
“The president is saying, stop DEI activities, but the president proclaimed February Black History Month, so the president is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Which message are you supposed to follow?” Kaine said. “School boards have good local counsel to give them advice on that, but nobody should be afraid of Black History Month, nobody should be afraid of diversity or equity or inclusion.”
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Chris Graham
