More than a year after they were denied public comment slots in a chaotic incident before a Cobb Board of Education meeting, two parents are suing the Cobb County School District and several employees from its communications department.
Attorneys for Melissa Marten and Jenny Peterson filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia on Thursday, alleging the district and staff members violated their constitutional free speech rights.
(You can read the lawsuit by clicking here.)
The matter at hand took place before the September 2023 board meeting, at which the public comment sign-up table was moved from inside the lobby of the Cobb school district headquarters, to a location outside of the entrance.
They claimed in their lawsuit that the changes were made to prevent district critics from speaking out against the firing of a Due West Elementary School teacher for reading a book to her students about a child with gender identity issues.
The teacher, Katie Rinderle, is suing the district for her 2023 termination. Her attorney, Craig Goodmark, also is representing Marten and Peterson in the lawsuit filed Thursday.
They allege that Cobb school district officials purposely changed the public comment sign-up process to prevent critical remarks about the Rinderle situation, referring to some of those critics as the “bad guys.”
Members of a group called the Cobb Community Care Coalition, which is generally critical of Superintendent Chris Ragsdale and the school board’s Republican majority, held a rally before the meeting.
Marten and Peterson, an East Cobb resident, lost their slots, and some people claimed they were shoved and injured in the ensuing chaos.
Critics said the change in sign-up policy occurred without any warning, and the result, according to the lawsuit, is that the “plaintiffs were blocked from speaking publicly in opposition to Defendants actions and policies.”
Marten and Peterson are seeking court action to prevent the district from “manipulation of the signup procedures limiting the opportunity of disfavored viewpoints from speaking during the public comment portion of the CCBOE public meeting.”
The backdrop of that Sept. 14, 2023 meeting also included a series of book removals by Ragsdale for sexually explicit content, of which the Cobb Community Care Coalition also expressed opposition.
The individual defendants named in the suit are Ragsdale and his Chief Strategy and Accountability Officer, John Floresta.
That’s the office that directs the district’s communications office, and whose staffers, including Julian Coca, Nan Kiel, Daniel Vehar, Zach Alderson and Amanda Chambers are also named as defendants.
The lawsuit claims that they used the district’s Microsoft Teams messaging system to plan a method to prevent critical speakers. Marten and Peterson, who are frequent speakers during public comment sessions, were wearing “Replace Ragsdale” shirts at the Sept. 14, 2023 meeting.
The lawsuit said that according to the Microsoft Teams messages, obtained through a public records request, the district communications staffers communicated about changing the sign-up process although some people had been waiting in line for lengthy periods.
“Citizens that had been participating in the anti-Ragsdale protest in front of the CCBOE building were physically moved away from the signup iPad. A video of the altercation shows a transgender student crying as the student was violently pushed to the ground and suffered injuries,” the lawsuit states.
At the school board meeting later, Ragsdale lit into his critics over the book removals and his decision to fire Rinderle, saying that the “ ‘radical new idea’ is not that schools have an obligation to protect students, but the radical new idea is that all children should somehow be forced to encounter sexually explicit language and instruction while at school.”
Related:
- Cobb schools named literacy leaders by Ga. superintendent
- Walton students, staff to be tested for tuberculosis
- Intelligence firm ‘partnering’ with Cobb schools on safety identified
- Cobb teachers of the year honored at Wheeler HS celebration
- Cobb schools get intelligence help to boost safety plans
- Cobb revises graduation policy after Sprayberry HS exclusion
- Cobb schools remove six more books for explicit content
- 4 East Cobb high schools lead in 2024 SAT scores
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