School officials in a Massachusetts town could have to attend First Amendment training to avoid legal action from a national organization that has won several landmark cases across the country on alleged constitutional violations.
Deborah Catalano, senior counsel for Liberty Counsel told The Epoch Times her organization is demanding several Newburyport officials, including the superintendent, teachers, and a crossing guard, undergo First Amendment training because of their “blatantly unconstitutional” actions against a grandfather who was passing out flyers for an upcoming concerned citizens meeting.
“This is a pure issue of trying to silence speech,” said Catalano.
The flyer local resident Larry Russell was passing out was for a meeting of Citizens for Responsible Education (CRE), a group which has protested LGBT and critical race theory teachings in the local school. The group also protested a town-sponsored teen dance hosted by a drag queen who allegedly posted videos promoting drug use on social media.
The school issued a no trespass order against Russell, banning the 73-year old from all school grounds, after he attempted to pass out the flyers to parents in a car lineup at the Edward G. Molin Upper Elementary School.
The school made multiple phone calls to police in an effort to block Russell from passing out the flyers and at least two teachers admitted in reports on the incident that they confronted Russell and told him to stop passing out the flyers.
According to Catalano’s letter, one of the police officers who responded to the school’s calls wrote in a report that the “school elicited a police response by falsely reporting a male driving erratically in front of the school.”
Russell, who has several grandchildren in the Newburyport school system, told The Epoch Times that one of the teachers who confronted him “physically hip checked him hard” while he was having a conversation with one of the parents in the car lineup.
School officials in their report on the incident claimed that Russell shoved a teacher, that he was disruptive, and also accused him of using profanities. Russell denied the claims.
“Contrary to the caricature painted in District correspondence, Mr. Russell is a mild mannered grandfather, 73 years of age, and is a life-long resident of Newburyport where he and his wife raised their five children,” Catalano wrote.
In addition to attending First Amendment training, Liberty Counsel has also demanded that the school revoke its no trespass order against Russell and circulate a district-wide email retracting its claims against him.
Liberty Counsel has included Newburyport Mayor Sean Reardon in its demands. Reardon admitted in an Oct. 20 email to The Epoch Times that he went to the public library and took down one of the meeting flyers hung there by Jim Baribeault, another CRE member.
“I can tell you that I was the one who personally took down the flyer for this CRE event at City Hall and the Library,” wrote Reardon. “After reviewing their content on social media it was not in line with the City of Newburyport’s values of being an inclusive and welcoming community.”
Library officials had initially refused to hang the flyer, but ultimately allowed Baribeault to put it up after he pointed out a pro-abortion and youth LGBT flyer hung on the same community board.
Reardon, Newburyport Superintendent Sean Gallagher, and the Newburyport School Committee did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times for this story.
In its letter of demand to Reardon, Gallagher, and the local school committee, Liberty Counsel pointed out its recent victory in a case in which it asked the U.S. Supreme Court to find the City of Boston had violated a Christian group’s First Amendment rights when it refused to fly its flag on a city-owned community flag pole.
The pole has long been used to fly hundreds of secular, political, and social justice flags including a myriad of pro-LGBT flags. The Supreme Court agreed with Liberty Counsel, setting national precedence over the protection of free speech rights on government grounds.
In a settlement that followed the SCOTUS decision, the City of Boston ended up paying more than $2 million in attorney fees to Liberty Counsel over the case.
In the past five years, Liberty Counsel has won at least a dozen landmark cases on free speech and First Amendment rights on public property.
In 2018, it won its bid to preserve the display of a donated Ten Commandments statue at a county courthouse in Florida, and two years earlier in 2016, a Cleveland, Ohio school paid attorney fees after a federal court found it had discriminated against a school Christian group by charging it fees to hold after-school club meetings.
