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Aug 20, 2023

PLSAS board to engage community on parental rights

The Prior Lake-Savage Area School District Services Center, 4540 Tower St. SE in Prior Lake. Parental rights were at the forefront at the latest Prior Lake-Savage Area School Board study session on

The Prior Lake-Savage Area School District Services Center, 4540 Tower St. SE in Prior Lake.

Parental rights were at the forefront at the latest Prior Lake-Savage Area School Board study session on Monday, Aug. 28.

The controversial topic has been making waves nationally and has made its way locally in the PLSAS district.

During the study session, a decision was made to not discuss the issue at a future study session or school board meeting due to legal reasons but rather develop a community engagement process to discuss the matter with the larger community.

According to a resolution presented by concerned parents during an open forum at the Aug. 14 school board meeting, the parental rights movement aims to give parents fundamental rights to play the principal role in directing the education of their children and to be fully informed of their children’s educational experience.

The resolution, Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools Commitment to Parental Rights and Transparency, also recently sparked a petition which argues that the school board is currently refusing to consider the parental rights resolution.

Before board members discussed the topic, Kate Cravens, a community member and alumni parent, went before the board during an open forum and said there was no need to consider a parental rights and transparency resolution because parents already have rights over their own children.

“Parents have rights over their most precious possessions, kids, already because they can homeschool and fully control what their kids are exposed to,” Cravens told the American. “What this is really about is an Evangelical Christian nationalist effort to control the education of all kids. It’s an effort rooted in a lack of respect and trust for educators as trained professionals. It’s not about kids, it’s about parental micromanagement of education.”

Board members Lisa Atkinson and Amy Bullyan, who brought the topic to light during the study session, were the only two board members to support discussing the topic at a future study session or board meeting.

“It has been brought to my attention that there is a strong community desire for that work,” Bullyan said. “What that looks like and how that moves forward as far as in our strategic plan, I think that it is a concern, that is a nonpartisan concern, on what parental rights looks like as far as our district and adding that to our future agenda topic I think is warranted.”

Bullyan also mentioned the petition circulating within the community and encouraged the board to discuss the resolution further to gratify concerned parents.

“That resolution was brought forward at our last meeting and since then there has been a community petition that has started,” Bullyan said. “I think for the sake of bringing down the temperature in our community and promoting something that we could unify around is the agreement that parental involvement is something that we respect and encourage in our district.”

Mary Frantz, school board member, stated that she was concerned about the topic due to legality issues and said she would prefer to seek legal counsel before going forward with any discussion on a parental rights resolution.

“Parental rights are statutory and obviously one parent’s domain is their own child and not anybody else’s child,” Frantz said. “I would personally like to know before we engage in that discussion what the intersection is, otherwise I think we’re going to be overstepping bounds and I don’t want to do that.”

During the study session, Superintendent Michael Thomas recommended to instead develop town hall meetings throughout the community to discuss parental rights and other concerns.

“I’ve said it a thousand times, and I’ll always say this, our parents are our student’s first teachers. We clearly have to respect and understand their rights as parents to govern their experiences for their own individual kids, no questions asked,” Thomas said. “I also feel like we’re in a lot of ‘us versus them’ situations or community against district, whatever the binary division is, I think it will be healthy for our community to engage around a variety of topics to declare levels of importance of what matters to really move us to a more unified approach to educating our kids.”

Enrique Velasquez, school board member, advised the board that the Equity and Inclusion Resolution was created in a similar process of community engagement.

“It was something that was already planned that our chair wanted to move forward with, we hadn’t developed anything yet, it was more of an idea,” Velasquez said. “It started with listening sessions with the different challenges throughout our communities and schools and it was a combination of staff, student voice, parent voice and general community voice that led to the formation of the resolution. It was mainly the community voice that developed it.”

To view the Prior Lake-Savage Area Schools Commitment to Parental Rights and Transparency, visit https://momsforliberty.org/files/5434/ To view the petition, visit https://tinyurl.com/5ffn4umv.

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