A Rhode Island mother has sued her school district, claiming it violated the state’s open meeting laws by holding meetings for the district’s racial advisory board in secret.
Nicole Solas and the Goldwater Institute filed the lawsuit against the South Kingstown School Committee after the board refused to allow her to attend the meetings of its black, indigenous, people of color, or BIPOC, advisory board.
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The lawsuit came after Solas had made several attempts to gain access to the meeting, including filing a complaint with the state attorney general’s office.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Solas accused the school district of deliberately attempting to hide the board’s controversial work by claiming that it was not subject to Rhode Island public meeting laws.
“They don’t want it to be done out in the open because they know that it will be scrutinized, and it would not be able to withstand criticism,” Solas said. “They said that they wanted to have black and brown people on this committee [and] that white people had to take a step back.”
Solas is represented by attorneys from the Goldwater Institute, an Arizona-based conservative nonprofit group.
Jon Riches, the institute’s general counsel and vice president for litigation, said that the school board in South Kingstown was using advisory committees to develop policies that would then be presented publicly to the school board, which would then approve whatever the committee recommended.
“The idea with doing these in an informal way is to prevent public input, which is precisely opposite of what the open meeting law is intended to do,” Riches told the Washington Examiner. “This clearly was set out by a public entity for purposes of conducting public business. The only reason it’s not expressly open to the public is because the public body responsible for this is trying to hide it.”
For Riches, the case is yet another example of school boards working with teacher unions to decide how children should be raised.
“Parents have a moral and a constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their kids,” he said. “The more parents are willing to stand up and assert their rights, like Nicole, the better off we’re going to be.”
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The South Kingstown School District did not respond to a request for comment.
