Conservative legal watchdog American First Legal (AFL) announced a major “victory” for a New Jersey school district after the U.S. Department of Education determined that the school system acted unlawfully by failing to offer students the option to opt out of participating in an “equity” and “diversity” survey that was distributed to them.
“When talking about gender identity and other sensitive issues, this is being used as a teaching tool, and there’s a very real problem of forcing these concepts on kids,” senior adviser Ian Pryor said in an interview with Fox News Digital..So this is really a two-fold concern: What are these surveys being used for in terms of data collection? But how are these surveys being used to essentially normalize things that parents and students might object to?”
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Students and classroom. (iStock/Getty)
In Cedar Grove, New Jersey, the local school district distributed surveys about sensitive topics like religion, household income, and gender identity without giving parents the opportunity to opt out. After parents complained to both the state and federal Departments of Education in mid-2021, the New Jersey State Board of Education ruled that the district had violated state law.
But the U.S. Department of Education did not act quickly enough, leading the AFL to file a lawsuit in 2023 to compel the federal agency to investigate.
Pryor explained that the AFL is creating a “Parent Toolkit” in early 2022 to help parents understand and use the Child Protection of Rights Amendment (PPRA), a federal law enacted in the 1970s that guarantees parents the right to access information about their children’s education, something that has often been overlooked in the past.
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Parent meetings (Courtesy of Beckett)
The Department of Education subsequently investigated and determined that Cedar Grove had indeed violated the PPRA. The department is now asking the district to comply with the law and submit the necessary paperwork by September.
“This law has been used very little for decades, but I think it’s showing its power — as a tool to enforce parental rights against school systems that go to great lengths to hide information from parents, for example,” Pryor said. “It’s encouraging to see that our work in the early stages of 2022 is bringing awareness to parents across the country about their rights.”
The Cedar Grove School District could not be reached for comment.
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Parent meetings (Courtesy of Beckett)
Parental rights have long been a key issue in the culture wars, and last week conservative think tanks launched an eight-figure effort to highlight Vice President Kamala Harris’ “radical” record on parental rights and transgender issues.
Also last week, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed into law a controversial order that bars schools in the state from forcing parents to notify them if their child uses pronouns or a gender identity that is opposite to their biological sex.
Fox News Digital’s Kendall Teets contributed to this report.
