Pamela Justice, the principal of Clyde Elementary School in Haywood County, sent students home with a letter asking parents to contact their legislators and voice opposition to Senate Bill 8, No Cap on Charter Schools.
The letter, printed on school letterhead, begins by calling S.B. 8 “a direct assault on public education.” (A scanned image of the letter, provided by a Clyde Elementary parent, appears on the right. A larger version is available here.) It warns the bill would siphon money from traditional public schools, force district schools to share athletic and band booster funds, likely resegregate schools, and allow homeschools and private schools to receive public money.
Much of the information in the letter, the content of which originally came from the North Carolina Principals and Assistant Principals Association, the lobbying group for K-12 public school principals, is either incorrect (including the charge that S.B. 8 would allow homeschools or private schools to collect public money and would force sharing of athletic and band funds) or an interpretation of the bill’s provisions that is disputed hotly (such as the allegations about resegregating schools).
The letter then asks parents to “join educators in calling for Senate Bill 8 to be stopped” by sharing the above messages with their family, friends, elected representatives and the media.” They are asked to share their concerns with all members of the House Education Committee and are given the phone numbers and e-mail addresses of their local representatives.
The letter may violate state law, said Jeanette Doran, a senior staff attorney with North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law.
General Statute 126-13 says state employees cannot engage in political activity on state time. It also says a state employee may not use the authority of his position, state funds or state supplies to support or oppose any candidate, party, or issue during an election.
While K-12 principals are not state employees, it’s unclear whether a principal can use school resources to urge political action by parents. Chapter 115C of the General Statutes makes local school boards responsible for setting rules governing the conduct of principals (spelled out in Sections 47[18] and 286), presumably including direct political activism of the type Justice engaged in.
Doran said the legality of the principal’s actions is debatable. The law allows schools to send out letters that educate the public about an issue, but it does not allow a call to political action, she said.
“There’s a gray area between educating and advocating,” Doran said. “I would say this probably is over the line, but there are a lot of others who wouldn’t.”
While it is a close call legally, Doran called the principal’s behavior an “egregiously bad idea” and “a practice that should be avoided.”
Superintendent of Haywood County Schools Anne Garrett agreed. “It’s in the gray area, and we have made a bad mistake,” Garrett said.
Garrett heard about the letter when parents complained about it at a recent school board meeting. She consulted with the school district’s attorney, who said the letter was inappropriate and could get the district in trouble. Garrett spoke with Justice and was assured it would not happen again.
This is Justice’s first year as a principal, Garrett said. She said the content in the letter originally came from the North Carolina Principals and Assistant Principals Association, the lobbying group for K-12 public school principals. The director of the association did not return a phone call or e-mail asking for comment.
“Being a new principal she thought, you know, ‘principals have written this… it’s OK to send out,’” Garrett said. The superintendent said all principals in her school district have been warned not to engage in similar behavior.
“We do not want to be in the gray,” she said. “We want to be above board on everything, and we do not want there to be any hint of gray on stuff that we do.”
Kristy Norton, parent of a second-grader and a fourth-grader at Clyde Elementary, said she thought the letter was totally inappropriate.
“Here you have a principal lobbying for something on school time with school resources, when we have teachers here who are restricted as to the number of copies they can make,” Norton said. “We’re in a budget crunch and here we can use school funds to send something out to lobby for a political stance.”
Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.