A Massachusetts grandfather has been slapped with a no-trespassing order for passing out flyers for a parent-led forum aimed at educating other parents about woke ideology being pushed on their children in the local schools.
Larry Russell, who has several grandchildren in the Newburyport schools, was told to stay off school grounds by Superintendent Sean Gallagher in an Oct. 12 letter and warned he would be arrested if he didn’t comply with the order.
The letter to Russell fell on the same week the small seacoast town was specifically named in a federal Republican-led Congressional investigation into alleged misuses of COVID emergency monies by public schools across the United States to fund liberal agendas like teaching critical race theory and gender affirming of children.
Newburyport is accused of using Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief money to hire consultants to promote the school woke agendas, including one that reportedly conducted an experiment using the “N” word with staff.
Russell, who is 73, told The Epoch Times he was shocked to see three police cruisers pull up to him as he was passing out flyers for the event, which is slated to take place on the evening of Oct. 20 at 6:30 p.m. at the local Elks lodge.
The ticketed event is entitled “What Every Parent Needs To Know About Social Emotional Learning” and will include a presentation by Jennifer McWilliams, an Indiana school teacher who gained national notoriety after being fired in 2020 for publicly denouncing her school’s social-emotional learning program as a harmful liberal-driven agenda.
Russell said he was passing out event flyers to parents while they were sitting in the car line waiting to pick up their kids at the Edward G. Molin Upper Elementary school.
He also passed out flyers to parents in the student pickup line at the Nock Middle School, where faculty also called the police on Russell.
“I should have a right to be on a public sidewalk and I shouldn’t be threatened by some [expletive] who thinks they are God,” said Russell, “and they all do. Everyone on the progressive side nowadays thinks they’re gods.”
Russell said he’s long considered himself liberal with half of his 10 grandchildren being African American, but recently joined the local group Citizens for Responsible Education, which organized the forum event,
In his letter to Russell, Gallagher accused him of being “abusive, disrespectful,” and using “profanities” to a school teacher when she asked him to leave.
“Your behavior caused a significant disruption to the school dismissal process,” wrote Gallagher. He also said Russell returned to the school after police told him to leave and not return.
Russell denied the claims and said that a teacher physically shoved him while he was having a conversation with one of the parents.
Jim Baribeault, a Newburyport resident concerned about the liberal agenda that has seeped into the schools, told The Epoch Times, when he tried to hang flyers at the town’s public library for the parent forum, he was given a variety of reasons of why it couldn’t be hung and then ultimately told it couldn’t be hung because it didn’t meet the library’s mission statement.
Baribeault pointed out that the same library hung posters advertising a teen drag queen dance in May and that at the time of his request to hang the flyer, he saw a flyer advertising an upcoming pro-abortion event by a local women’s group.
The library also approved a flyer for an event entitled “Beyond White Fragility: Digging Deeper.”
One of the planned discussions for the event is about “how progressive white people unconsciously perpetuate racial harm.”
The library’s bulletin board for community flyers also includes a standing flyer for the North Shore Alliance for LGBT which goes by the acronym NAGLY.
When Baribeault complained about the double standards, the head librarian Sara Kelso sent him an email informing him that after review of the libraries “current guidelines and procedures,” the flyer has been publicly posted on the library community board.”
However, a day after the flyer was displayed, Newburyport’s Mayor Sean Reardon personally took it down.
In a written statement to The Epoch Times, Reardon said he removed the flyer because the parent’s group—Citizens for Responsible Education, which organized the event “was not in line with the city’s values of being an inclusive and welcoming community.”
“The city bulletin boards are primarily for non-profit organizations and we reserve the right to remove flyers that are inconsistent with the city’s values,” said Reardon.
Reardon called the same group “a handful of bad actors” when they objected to a teen dance hosted by a drag queen earlier this year.
