Yesterday we shared that a school district in Bucks County was taken to court for violating freedom of speech during school board meetings.
Today we’re going to show you how our very own school district—including our current and former superintendent—violated free speech during a school board meeting in January 2021. A Right to Know request (see images) revealed that 75 percent of the public comments were censored.
Note that the board meeting on January 25, 2021 was held online due to Covid.
Also note that he district removed the video of this board meeting from the district’s You Tube channel.
The words highlighted in yellow were censored by the district, and were NOT read aloud during the meeting. This is a violation of the First Amendment and is against the law.
The district originally contended that the comments were censored due to time constraints, but the red text shows the (start and stop) time stamp on the original video of the meeting, and also shows the total amount of time it took for Dr. Sokolowski to read the comments. Clearly the comments came in well under the 2 minute time limit.
Take a look at which comments that were censored by the district, and then ask yourself: Why the district would want to censor these comments?
Also ask yourself: Who was responsible for running the meeting and/or censoring the comments? (It is difficult to assess this since the video has been taken down by the district, but at that time, Dr. Scanlon was the superintendent, and Dr. Sokolowski was the assistant superintendent. Per state law, the meetings are the responsibility of the school board. Dr. Scanlon ran this particular meeting, with Dr. Sokolowski reading the censored comments.)
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