Parents going to court over DEI - Fine Point Communications

Refill mentioned two years ago that DEI work in classrooms has led some parents to conclude that schools have “begun to teach what to think, instead of how to think.”

Now a few parents are taking that conclusion further, asserting in lawsuits that this amounts to a bait-and-switch — or, legally speaking, a breach of contract — that victimizes parents after they have paid tuition.

This month, Bloomberg took a look at court cases involving independent schools that have incorporated DEI curricula. To me, the suits seem dubious and unlikely to succeed. After all, as one lawyer put it, “If a person doesn’t like what is being taught, they can go somewhere else.”

Winning over a judge or a jury may not be the point, though. Rather, these frustrated adults may be appealing to the court of public opinion.

For instance, a man who pulled his daughter from The Brearley School in 2021 told Bloomberg that, over the past two years, “it has been ‘nearly impossible’ to find a school that challenges his daughter academically but isn’t ‘politicized.’ ” That parent is now running for Congress.

It may be too early to label DEI lawsuits a trend, but it is a development for communicators to notice and monitor.

Meanwhile, a Bloomberg columnist who teaches law at Yale makes the interesting observation that lawsuits are likeliest to prevail when they focus on student discipline. That’s a reminder to independent schools to look hard at their student handbooks and other policy documents to ensure discipline protocols are up to date.

The bear facts: When the media get things wrong

This month, I found myself on the opposite end of the microphone — talking to news reporters in a personal, not professional, capacity — after a black bear prowled my backyard. (Yes, it was a slow news day.)

The young bear was attracted to beehives that my teenager and I maintain, and on back-to-back evenings, it had fun knocking them over and noshing on the honey and bee brood inside. After the second night, state wildlife officials were called in, successfully trapped the bear and took it away to the countryside.

The bear capture was irresistible to D.C. reporters, and I was interviewed by print, radio and TV outlets. Heck, even the Tokyo Shimbun reached out.

This is all pertinent for you, dear reader, because the resulting stories proved an old media truth: In spite of all your efforts to help a reporter get the facts right, you should expect that something in a news story will almost certainly be misunderstood or mischaracterized.

In this case, the errors were small and minor (although my family noticed them right away). They occurred not from malice or malpractice but just because communication is imperfect. Either the reporter misheard something I said, or they made a faulty conclusion, or details got lost through the editing process.

Remember when working with the media that “close enough” may be the best you get from a news story. Journalism, after all, is the first draft of history.

Of course, you can try to correct the record, and if the errors are egregious enough, you absolutely should do so. Here, I didn’t ask for any corrections, recognizing that most readers or viewers wouldn’t notice what jumped out to me and my family.

When you next work with a news reporter on a story about your school, keep expectations in check about the final outcome.

Don’t-miss clicks

Have you settled your summer communications plans yet? If not, check out this Refill post from last May with 10 ideas for how best to use June, July and August to set up your office for success next year.
Orlando, Fla., gave a school divided by a downtown city street permission to close off the public sidewalks on either side of the road. (The street was already closed to vehicle traffic.) The principal explained the request by saying, “We cannot keep our children safe from the outside. The Nashville shooting [was] an example of what we are trying to prevent.” That persuaded the Orlando mayor, who said, “I wouldn’t want to have blood on my hands if we let strangers walk through the middle of school, during the school day and something were to occur.”
Speaking of the Sunshine State, it seems that independent schools are all the rage in South Florida these days as new, well-heeled residents arrive from New York, California and Chicago. Applications and donations are up, and so is anxiety among longtime Floridians, who worry that their children may be locked out of admission to particular schools, reports the Financial Times (!).
Finally, check out this uplifting story about four Afghan girls who enrolled this year at St. Margaret’s School in Virginia. St. Margaret’s is a girls’ boarding school, and it is very small. For any such school, providing four full-ride scholarships presents an extreme economic challenge. Nevertheless, St. Margaret’s rose to its mission to do the virtuous thing: They welcomed the girls in. (Full disclosure: The school is a Fine Point client, although we had no role in this story.) At the end of a long school year, this story will remind you the good that can result from what we do.