State lawmakers received hundreds of emails from students and teachers across Rutherford County last month expressing opposition to Senate Bill 8, No Cap on Charter Schools. The emails were sent during school hours from school email accounts. Several parents and legislators call the activity inappropriate. A constitutional scholar believes it may be illegal.

This marks at least the second time public school employees have used school resources to oppose S.B. 8. After Carolina Journal reported on a Haywood County school principal sending home letters to parents in opposition to the bill, questions arose about whether school employees were exempt from a state law prohibiting state employees from engaging in political activity.

Rep. Sarah Stevens, R-Surry, said she received several hundred emails from students, teachers and parents in Rutherford County. Excepting those from parents, most emails were written from school email accounts during hours students normally are in class.

Most appear to be cut from the same mold, Stevens said. Not one of them supported S.B. 8, and many repeated the same talking points and what Stevens called “misinformation.”

Messages surfacing regularly in the emails include:

• Programs like ROTC and More at Four will cease to exist if charter schools get more funding

• Students no longer will receive free and reduced lunches

• New charter schools would restore racial segregation

• Senate Bill 8 is a “back door voucher” for homeschoolers to get public funding

Some emails contained more outlandish concerns. One student claimed S.B. “could lead to obesity.” Another said “agriculture, auto shop and band” might be “taken away.” Another feared he would no longer be able to play soccer.

“If JROTC is stopped there will be many to drop out of school, many will commit suicide and there will not be as many good people out there,” one R-S Central High School student wrote.

Another student wrote, “i am a 13 year old girl who is suffering with diabetes and if the senate bill 8 passes my grandmother will no longer have enough money to pay for the gas to take me to my appointments.”

It is unclear where some of these notions originated, but the majority of the emails’ messages can be found on a Facebook fan page called “Stop NC Senate Bill 8.” The webpage has more than 1,000 fans, and was created by Kelli Fisher Wilson, the parent of a first-grader and an eighth-grader in Rutherford County Schools. Evidently, the Facebook page is used as a meeting place for parents to vent their frustrations over the bill and to organize activities to defeat it.

Fisher provides parents with form letters they can email to their representatives and postcards they can print and mail to the governor. She also includes links to talking points from the North Carolina Association of Educators, the North Carolina School Boards Association, the North Carolina Association of School Administrators, the North Carolina Principals and Assistant Principals Association and the Rutherford County Board of Education.

The Facebook page also was used to advertise an “information session about school funding and Senate Bill 8” held in East Rutherford High School’s gymnasium March 7. Superintendent Janet Mason and School Board Chairman John Mark Bennett both gave “inspiring speeches” at the meeting, according to one Facebook fan. More than 500 parents attended.

Bennett denied that he or the Superintendent in any way encouraged the mass emailing. He said to his knowledge, no one was “directed” to write the emails and that teachers and students were responding to S.B. 8 “of their own volition.”

“Our students have computers and email accounts available for their use, and many have used these to express their opinions to legislators,” Bennett wrote in an email to Carolina Journal. “While there has been no organized campaign to do this within our schools, it seems an appropriate civics lesson for citizens of our state (students included) to express their opinions to their elected officials.”

However, at least one student email indicates teachers did direct or at least “ask” students to participate.

“We have been asked to send an email to you to show our opposition of Senate Bill 8,” a student from R-S Central High School wrote. “I will admit that I didn’t really know much about the bill and honest didn’t really care until I started to hear rumors about it.”

Also, if Mason did not organize the email protest, she at least refereed it. Bennett said it came to his and Mason’s attention that some of the emails contained “inappropriate and disrespectful” language.

“I in no way condone that,” Bennett said. “And our superintendent, when she became aware of this, communicated to our students that such communication was inappropriate and would not be tolerated.”

Mason did not return a phone call asking for comment.

Legality

N.C. General Statute 126-13 says “no state employee subject to the Personnel Act … shall … engage in engage in political activity while on duty or within any period of time during which he is expected to perform services for which he receives compensation from the state” or “otherwise use the authority of his position, or utilize state funds, supplies or vehicles to secure support for or oppose any candidate, party, or issue …”

Meanwhile, G.S. 126-5 (c2) states: “The provisions of this Chapter shall not apply to public school superintendents, principals, teachers, and other public school employees.”

Jeanette Doran, a senior staff attorney with the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, said the exemption should not give teachers and other school district employees a free hand to engage in political advocacy on school district time.

While school employees may be granted the right to use the “authority of their position” to persuade the public on political issues while off-duty, Doran said it is never appropriate to use state resources to do so.

Doran also said she didn’t think the statute allowed school employees to use state resources such as school telephones, computers, email accounts, copiers, paper, stamps or class time to support or oppose a political issue.

“If the exemption covered everything — even when they are on duty and even if they were using government resources — there wouldn’t be anything to keep teachers from running a campaign out of their classroom,” Doran added. “I think a superintendent can, when off duty, say ‘hey, I’m a superintendent, and I support this particular bill.’ But I don’t think he can get in a state-owned vehicle, drive to Raleigh, [and] distribute fliers that were copied on government-owned paper to support that bill,” she said.

Rep. George Cleveland, R-Onslow, said if somehow school employees are exempt from G.S. 126, they shouldn’t be. He said teachers are free to contact their elected representatives about any issue at any time, except when they’re supposed to be teaching students.

“They’re wasting the educational time that they’re being paid to use to increase the knowledge of their student,” Cleveland said. “That’s wrong.”

“And to encourage students to do something in class … students are not stupid. They know they are supposed to be being taught, and instead they’re being used for political purposes. That’s inappropriate.”

Stevens said it wasn’t fair for teachers to use their podiums as bully pulpits to influence children one way or the other on political issues.

“You only bring children into the debate if you’re going to bring them fully into the debate,” she said. “You’ve got a captive audience during the day. You should set up a meeting after school hours, in a neutral, public place and you invite people to present both sides.”

Sara Burrows is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.