When the Francis Howell school board decided to implement an advertising policy last year, it became an obstacle that Ken Gontarz had not anticipated.
“There was some nebulous, uncertain terminology as to how extensive that policy could be used in silencing opposition to what the school board may or may not want to have articulated by different people who speak at the monthly school board meetings,” said Gontarz whose grandchildren attended school in the district.
A conservative Political Action Committee (PAC) called Francis Howell Families (FHF) was founded by Gontarz and he had freely and regularly commented at school board meetings along with other members of the PAC.
“It’s important to be able to comment because of what we uncovered with Critical Race Theory in Francis Howell's school content,” Gontarz told the St. Louis Record.
So, after the school board president announced that Francis Howell families could not state the PAC name or website during school board meetings all while allowing other organizations and people to speak theirs, Gontarz, Christopher Brooks, and Katherine Rash filed a lawsuit in federal court on Feb. 11.
“Francis Howell Families wants to talk about Jim Crow laws,” Gontarz said. “We want to talk about Plessy v Ferguson. We want to talk about Brown v The Board of Education. We want full disclosure of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We want to talk about lynching and the disgusting nature of what happened to enslaved black people and the three-fifths of an individual doctrine. We want that fully vetted but we do not want a Black Lives Matter or Antifa perspective taught to children. It's dangerous.”
The PAC subsequently had success on April 5 when two board of education candidates who had been promoted by the Francis Howell Families (FHF) PAC were elected, according to media reports, and on April 12 Eastern District of Missouri Judge Stephen Clark ruled in favor of the families.
As previously reported in the St. Louis Record, Clark held that the St. Charles County school district was engaging in viewpoint discrimination when it selectively enforced a no-advertising policy during a school board meeting’s public commentary.
The case was settled with the school district agreeing to pay $70,000 in legal fees to the families' legal counsel.
“It was never about the money," Gontarz added. "It was nothing other than Francis Howell Families wanted to be treated identically and the same as anybody else coming to that school board meeting and we felt that we were being singled out and silenced."