Springfield Public School board is compromising the transparency of and public trust in government by withholding public records requested by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, according to an area educator.
Schmitt sued SPS in Greene County Circuit Court alleging violations of the Sunshine Law regarding Critical Race Theory in the classroom after the school district announced it would not release training materials to the public.
“Springfield Public Schools is playing a terrible game of roulette with whatever funding they think they're going to get from the public in the future if they continue to obfuscate what by law should be available so that they can perform their civic duty as part of the checks and balances of what public government is up to,” said Mary Byrne, who holds a doctorate in education from Teacher's College at Columbia University in Manhattan. “The fundamental fabric of what it means to be a citizen is at risk.”
Schmitt
The complaint, filed on Nov. 16, alleges that teachers and staff are required to consult an oppression matrix and identify where they fall on the diagram.
“When the public finds out what is actually in those documents, there is going to be a great human cry and I think it will affect the election of the incumbent school board members,” Byrne told the St. Louis Record.
According to the oppression matrix, privileged social groups include white people, males assigned at birth, and Protestants, which Byrne alleges is based on Marxist theory.
“It was introduced into education in 1995 by faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and yet the public perception with what has been told to them that the George Floyd event that triggered this sudden raising of consciousness about whiteness and white supremacy when in fact this has been developing for decades,” said Byrne who lives in Springfield.
When George Floyd, a black man, was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer last year, the incident prompted worldwide protests last year.
"If parents have to keep their children in public schools, what they can do is come together and file a lawsuit that's going to ask the courts that the district complies with 170.231 as well as the Sunshine Law that this particular suit requests," Byrne added.
Section 170.231 of Missouri Revised Statutes states that the school board of each school district shall provide that all public school instructional material intended for use in connection with any public school classroom instruction, or any public school research or experimentation program or project, shall be available for inspection by any person.
"There are many situations where parents cannot homeschool or pay for private school but there are parents who are willing to make the sacrifice and figure out different models of learning because they don't want their kids subjected to an ideology that is in conflict with their faith and has no basis in data," Byrne said.