A Massachusetts couple has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to decide if parents have a First Amendment right to video record school officials when discussing their children in private meetings.
The case could decide a longstanding circuit court split on the issue of where, how, and under what circumstances government officials can be recorded.
One of them, The Equal Protection Project, argues that clarification from the Supreme Court is critical to protect parents from what it calls an “educational secrecy and deliberate movement underground” of some schools to “hide unlawfully discriminatory policies and procedures from public view and knowledge.”
The group cited parents being hit with outrageous fees by schools to fulfill their public record requests and being ostracized for questioning “secretive school policies.”
On a broader scale, the organization hopes the case will establish that the “most fundamental purpose” of the First Amendment is to protect the American people’s “search for truth.”
“And a fulsome search for truth frequently requires the ability to document and preserve information uncovered in the course of this search,” the group wrote in its brief.
Adam Shelton, staff attorney with the Goldwater Institute, which filed the Supreme Court petition, explained to The Epoch Times that his organization’s main focus is to establish parents’ First Amendment right to record teachers when they are not in “indisputably public settings,” but instead at home in virtual meetings such as Zoom and Google Meet or in private settings such as an office.
He said it would allow parents to establish accurate records and more accountability over what school officials say in private meetings at a time when parents are increasingly at odds with officials over certain subject matters.
“I think this could potentially play a role in protecting parents in situations where they are under investigation,” he said.
The two other groups filing briefs in support of the challenge petition to the Supreme Court are the Liberty Justice Center and the Center for American Liberty.
The case arose from an attempt by Scott and Roxanne Pitta of Bridgewater to record an online meeting with school officials at the Bridgewater-Raynham School District over an Individualized Education Program (IEP) plan for their teenage son, who was diagnosed with autism at a young age.
“We sold it to him as his superpower, we didn’t want it to be a negative,” Roxanne, who is an elementary school teacher in the district, said in a video interview posted on the Goldwater Institute website.
The Pittas explain in the video that they requested the meeting after the IEP Team decided to end their son’s IEP plan.
According to the couple, in previous unrecorded online meetings, some team members said they had recommended against removing their son from the IEP plan and that they were told to “recheck their evaluations” while team members who supported removing him were not.
When the Pittas saw that evaluations in favor of keeping their son on the IEP were not part of the mandatory form used by the school to make determinations about continuing a student in the program, they requested that the school add them, but the school refused, they said.
When The Pittas asked for another meeting, the IEP Team agreed to one. A video shows that when the Pittas announced they were recording it, Team Chair Dina Medeiros stopped the meeting and warned the Pittas she would end it if the Pittas didn’t stop recording. They refused and the meeting ended.
The school did not respond to repeated inquiries from The Epoch Times about the case.
It concluded that First Amendment protections for “filming government officials engaged in their duties in a public place,” did not apply because the “meeting did not occur in a ”public space.”
School Superintendent Ryan Powers said in a statement to The Epoch Times that a video recording of the meeting would have violated the Pittas’ son’s confidentiality rights.
“To have found otherwise would have resulted in a legal outcome which could have exposed the disabilities and educational needs of students to third parties, without students’ knowledge or consent,” said Mr. Powers.
“Indeed, an outcome which would have supported the plaintiff’s claims would have upended long-established laws providing confidentiality to students,” he said.
Mr. Powers also said the Pittas were ultimately offered the option of audio recording future meetings. Mr. Shelton said an audio recording would not adequately authenticate who was speaking during the meeting.
In the Pittas’ complaint, the Goldwater Institute points out that while four of the 12 Circuit Courts of Appeal have determined that video recordings are “inherently expressive creations” protected under the First Amendment, six others have held that the First Amendment protects only “the video recording of public employees in the performance of their duties” that serve a public interest—thus creating a circuit split.
