A school has gotten caught promoting online pornography as “art,” and then concealing that agenda from parents.
And officials with the American Center for Law and Justice aren’t letting it slide.
“Our clients, Stephanie Boyanski and Jessy Roberts, were horrified to learn that their seventh-grade children were assigned to visit an unvetted website containing graphic sexual images as part of an art project. The teacher, Ms. Bridgette Gates, displayed these images on a Smart Board in class, acknowledged that ‘some images were inappropriate,’ and then instructed students to ‘ignore them and be mature,’” the ACLJ explained about the dispute that has arisen in Watertown City School District in New York.
There, students in seventh grade were ordered to see pornography “under the guise of an ‘art lesson.’”
“This wasn’t an accident. Students viewed this explicit material repeatedly over the course of approximately two weeks, for a graded assignment. No parental notice. No opt-out option. No filtering of graphic content. No alternative assignment,” the legal team explained. “One of the students involved is a survivor of sexual assault. This assignment triggered traumatic memories, and this student is now in counseling as a direct result of the school’s actions.”
The lawyers said they are taking action, beginning with a formal demand letter to the superintendent outlining the district’s constitutional violations and its failure to protect students from exposure to pornographic material.
“We are demanding a formal reprimand in the teacher’s file, a clear policy barring teachers from showing sexually explicit content to children without parental notification, mandatory parental consent and opt-out procedures, and district-funded counseling for students traumatized by the assignment,” the ACLJ explained.
It’s a district with which the ACLJ is familiar, at it earlier refused to provide legally required access to a religious group.
The report noted the parents only found out about the violations by accident, through parents who reviewed an assignment on their students’ school laptops and found the “sexually explicit” material.
The teacher at the time blamed the IT department for not blocking it, but the school then refused to let parents meet with the teacher.
The district then claimed the students had “come across inappropriate content,” but that, the ACLJ said, wasn’t the case.
“That phrasing was deliberately misleading. Students did not ‘come across’ anything. They were assigned to view this graphic content by their teacher.”
When the dispute came before the school board, “The president of the teachers’ union mobilized teachers to attend the meeting in ‘solidarity,’ canceled after-school activities to ensure staff attendance, and distributed ‘Fact Over Fiction’ pins – an unmistakable message aimed at parents. He went so far as to compare concerned parents to vandals of his Little Free Library outside of his home and dismissed them as ‘internet warriors,’” the legal team explained.
But the law is on the side of the parents, the report said. “For over a century, the Supreme Court has affirmed that parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”