The Left lost control of a school board, so it called in the ACLU and Biden administration
Timothy P. Carney
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A new investigation from lawyers hired by a school board outside of Philadelphia undermines claims by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Philadelphia media that a GOP-controlled school board created a hostile environment toward gay and transgender students.
The 140-page report, presented at a school board meeting and made public Thursday night, paints a picture of an activist teacher breaking the rules to manipulate students and the media and then becoming a media darling after getting suspended for it. They also reveal that the supposedly anti-gay school administrators were, in fact, aggressive in cracking down on bullying.
AMERICA’S DEADLY DISEASE OF MISTRUST
The story in short: After the voters of Bucks County in 2021 swung the Central Bucks school board from Democratic control to a 6-3 Republican majority, one of the Democratic board members, and one activist teacher who was a labor union vice president, worked with the ACLU, the Biden administration’s Education Department, and the Philadelphia media to paint school leadership and the school board’s policies as harmful to gay and transgender students.
Andrew Burgess was a teacher at Lenape Middle School in Bucks County who became a media celebrity after being suspended. The ACLU filed complaints with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, mostly stemming from Burgess’s battles with the school board. The original charge alleged that school and district administrators didn’t do anything about rampant bullying of gay and transgender students.
Subsequent complaints called Burgess’s dismissal unfair retaliation and alleged the school district refused to readmit into the building students who participated in a walkout in support of Burgess and that the school board’s new policies against teacher political lecturing in the classroom and age-inappropriate books were discriminatory and created a hostile environment.
The Philadelphia Inquirer and other local outlets followed the Central Bucks story closely, almost always taking the Burgess-ACLU line verbatim. The attorneys interviewed Burgess and dozens of others, had access to school district emails and messages, and found a very different story.
When one student told Burgess of “anti-LGBTQ” bullying and discrimination, Burgess discouraged this student from telling the counselors or principal, which is the proper method of handling such cases. Instead, Burgess personally collected all the accusations, created a dossier, and never shared it with the administration. Instead, he sent it to the ACLU.
Discouraging the student from properly reporting the harassment and bullying allowed Burgess to claim the school was turning a blind eye to the incidents. Burgess, the investigation suggests, was politically motivated to paint the school district in a negative light after the Republican takeover in 2021.
Burgess, it seems, wanted to peddle the story that the district’s new rules — requiring sex-segregated sex-ed classes, barring teachers from flying trans flags or other political banners in the classroom, requiring parental permission for student name changes, and barring teaching age-inappropriate material — created a hostile environment. In the process, Burgess broke the rules, hid bullying allegations from the school and district, and manipulated a middle school student into keeping these allegations from the administration.
In fact, Lenape Middle School principal Geanine Saullo emailed Burgess in the same weeks when Burgess was collecting his dossier. “I know earlier in the year [Student 1] was experiencing some negative attention from peers,” Saullo wrote. “I was wondering if you have seen anything lately or if things have improved.”
When Burgess replied that this student was still experiencing bullying and harassment, the principal replied: “Please encourage [Student 1] to bring these things to our attention. I would hate to see suffering in silence.” Burgess wrote back, “Will do and thank you!” But he didn’t. Instead, he kept the dossier of accusations to himself until he could take it to the media and the OCR.
Earlier messages Burgess sent indicated he was very familiar with the process of submitting problems of discipline, bullying, and harassment.
“Something I really like this year is how prompt Lauren Dowd has been with responses to [behavior] reports when I submit them,” Burgess wrote in one message to colleagues. “I think I get a reply either the same day or the next day with what is happening with it every time.”
Burgess couldn’t name a single instance of reported anti-gay or anti-trans bullying that the school district failed to address, the district’s lawyers stated in their brief.
The investigation also debunked the specific charges against the district.
One specific harassment incident the ACLU cited involved a particular student harassing the lunch table at which gay and transgender students tended to sit. The ACLU implied the school did nothing about it. The investigation showed the opposite.
School records and messages confirm the “ringleader” of the harassment got disciplined for harassing the gay and transgender children at lunchtime. This student was barred from the lunchroom temporarily, and the school agreed that when this student returned to the lunchroom, they would place the lunch monitor close to the table he had been harassing.
In the school board meeting on April 20, all three Democrats voted against releasing the investigation to the public and objected that one of the lawyers involved in the investigation was former prosecutor Bill McSwain, who ran for governor as a Republican in 2022.
The Biden administration’s investigation of the district was spurred, the district’s lawyers learned, by one Democratic school board member.
The lawyers’ investigation reports: “A member of the Central Bucks Board of School Directors, Karen Smith, wrote an e-mail message directed to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and OCR Head Catherine Lhamon. In her e-mail, Ms. Smith complained that she had been outvoted by the Board’s Republican majority on several policy issues that she claimed affected LGBTQ students. Ms. Smith is one of three Democrats on the nine-member School Board. Ms. Smith falsely stated that the School District had ‘suspend[ed] an exemplary teacher for protecting a transgender student.’ She further urged OCR to join in her ‘fight[]’ against the Board’s Republican majority.”