Tag: Derek Schmidt

Parental rights fight in Kansas schools spawns book bans, scrutiny of LGBTQ students

Schmidt highlights legislation, which Kelly vetoed, in campaign for governor

by Rachel Mipro, Kansas Reflector

Topeka — Lawmakers say remnants of a proposed parents’ bill of rights are impacting school districts, referencing several schools’ transgender student policies and recent attempts to remove books from curriculum.

Critics of the parents’ bill of rights say the proposal is unnecessarily restrictive.

Under the bill, which Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed in April, each public school district would implement an online portal where parents of K-12 students would be able to inspect a variety of lessons, syllabi, books, tests and magazines, among other learning tools. The parents could object to learning materials and block them from their child.

The GOP-controlled Legislature fell short of the two-thirds majority needed in both the Senate and House to override Kelly’s veto. Now, Republican Attorney General Derek Schmidt promises to sign the bill within his first 100 days in office if he wins November’s gubernatorial election.

Sen. Molly Baumgardner, chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee, said the legislation was about transparency and benefits school districts. As a former public school teacher, she said, the legislation fell in line with her former job responsibilities, such as distributing syllabi and informing parents on how grades would be determined.

Baumgardner said the legislation was based on feedback from parents and concerned community members after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Is it workable? Absolutely,” Baumgardner said. “Is it punitive? Absolutely not. There was no stick, no punishment. But what it did do is it set some guidelines, so that there would be consistency from school district to school district.”

The legislation was modeled on recommendations by the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and mirrored packages introduced in multiple states.

Sen. Cindy Holscher, D-Overland Park, a vocal opponent of the bill, said many state senators were out of touch with how public education works. Out of the 40 current senators, only four have experience with their children attending public schools, she said.

Holscher said the bill was unnecessary and took attention away from real issues, such as the teacher shortage in the state. She said she believes the bill will come back in some form during the next legislative session.

“The fact of the matter is we have a super majority of extremists who have been working to defund our schools for many years, so it will come back,” Holscher said. “That’s always two things I always say about Topeka: Bad bills never die, and it can always get worse. It’ll come back.”

Holscher said public education would be threatened if Kelly is voted out of office.

“If we don’t retain her and there’s still a supermajority, the house has fallen off the cliff honestly, because the super majority of extremists, if they have their governor in power, will be able to knock away the foundation of our public schools. And that’s very concerning,” Holscher said.

In a Sept. 16 news release, Schmidt reiterated his commitment to passing the legislation.

“Laura Kelly and the teachers unions that bankroll her campaigns believe that they are in charge of schools,” Schmidt said. “They are not. Our public schools function at the highest level only when parents are deeply involved in their children’s education and when they work in tandem with a good teacher. That’s why today, I am calling on the Kansas Legislature, within the first 100 days I’m in office, to send me a Parents Bill of Rights.”

Kelly has repeatedly criticized the bill, including in her veto statement, in which she said she was committed to addressing parental concerns in a different way.

Rep. Stephanie Byers, D-Wichita, said the legislation would hurt education in the state in general, and would also target LGBTQ students because teachers would have an obligation to notify parents about their child’s pronouns and other preferences. Byers was an educator for almost 30 years and is the first transgender person elected to the Legislature.

“That helps kind of build that darkness around and continue to build that darkness that depression that builds up and they don’t get to live authentically,” Byers said. “They don’t get to feel what truth feels like, to be yourself. That creates other issues. The parents’ bill of rights puts an interesting burden on teachers and schools.”

Byers said Schmidt is using the legislation to gain support among his peers. Schmidt also opposes critical race theory and the “age-inappropriate gender or sexual identity content, discussions, or curriculums in the classroom,” as he said in a campaign website post.

“I think he’s pushing it so hard because he lacks direction for what his own platform should be,” Byers said. “And so he’s looking at who he perceives to be the leaders of the Republican Party in the state of Kansas. On education issues, it’s going to be Kristey Williams, it’s going to be Renee Erickson that he looks to and they’re going to be the ones that push this through in the respective committees.”

Sen. Erickson, R-Wichita, and Rep. Williams, R-Augusta, have supported the legislation, saying it would empower parents.

“Parents as their children’s first and most important teachers is a universally held belief,” Erickson said in Schmidt’s Sept. 16 news release. “That is the foundation for the Parents Bill of Rights. If school officials truly value transparency, they should embrace parental involvement in every aspect of their child’s education.”

Byers believes the bill would worsen book bans in the state. The Seaman school district voted this week to take “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” out of circulation, and the evaluation comes in the wake of other Kansas school book removals. Goddard Public Schools and Derby Public Schools both banned “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” in 2021.

Goddard removed more than two dozen books from the district’s school libraries in November 2021 before reversing the decision, and students in the North Kansas City School District campaigned to get novels dealing with sexuality and gender put back on the shelves.

“The bill of rights, if it were to pass, guarantees parents some sort of right of censorship,” Byers said.

Rep. Susan Estes, R-Wichita, said the legislation was a way to address parents’ feelings about Kelly closing schools for two months at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They watched their children suffer academic losses,” Estes said in Schmidt’s Sept. 16 news release. “They felt abandoned and voiceless. The Parents’ Bill of Rights acknowledges that parents are the primary decision maker in a child’s life and ensures they have a seat at the table and a full plate of information from which to make the best decisions for their child.”

Director of communications for the Kansas National Education Association, Marcus Baltzell, said the gubernatorial election reignited his and his fellow educator’s concerns about governmental overreach in education.

“What this is really about is about putting more pressure on educators to essentially sacrifice themselves on the altar of right wing extremism,” Baltzell said.

Kansas Reflector stories, www.kansasreflector.com, may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
See more at https://kansasreflector.com/2022/09/30/parental-rights-fight-in-kansas-schools-spawns-book-bans-scrutiny-of-lgbtq-students/.

Kansas ads in governor’s race: Often misleading, disparaging with a partisan dash of truth

Kelly, Schmidt loyalists post dozens of commercials — and Pyle piles on

by Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflecor

Topeka — The battle between distortion and nuance rages in the Kansas gubernatorial race as dozens of commercials flood television and the internet in a quest to influence voters’ views of Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly and Republican challenger Derek Schmidt.

In the last few days, independent governor candidate Dennis Pyle added his voice to the electronic dialogue with his first piece of campaign advertising. It predictably attacked both Schmidt and Kelly as “two peas in a pod.”

Schmidt, the state’s attorney general, has joined allies in taking swings at Kelly by asserting the governor cavalierly closed public schools in response to the COVID-19 national emergency. It’s as if Schmidt wanted voters to imagine Kelly personally padlocking chains to school doors.

These ads don’t remind Kansans of life-or-death uncertainty about COVID-19 that existed in March 2020 when Kelly directed local and state officials to transition the education system to online instruction. In that moment, there was no testing, no personal protection equipment and no vaccine to counter a lethal virus easily spread at mass gatherings.

In response to criticism of being the first governor to suspend in-school classes, Kelly said she would “never apologize for protecting the lives of our children.”

Throughout the campaign, Kelly and her allies have worked to tattoo Schmidt as a clone of former Gov. Sam Brownback, an unpopular Republican who derailed the state budget with a fantasy quest to eliminate Kansas’ income tax. Brownback’s strangulation of state government’s revenue stream led to years of budget problems, deep spending cuts and, ironically, tax hikes.

Kansas Values Institute’s PAC, which backs Kelly, has produced no less than eight commercials devoted to affirming a Brownback-Schmidt ideological alliance.

A comparable guilt-by-association approach was used four years ago in Kelly’s successful campaign against Republican nominee Kris Kobach. The messaging was given a boost by Kobach, who promised to surpass Brownback’s zeal for slashing taxes and spending.

Schmidt, of course, hasn’t promised to recharge Brownback’s disproven tax agenda, which was repealed in 2017 by the GOP-led Legislature after a dismal five-year experiment.

Transgender feud

Advertising wordsmiths have dedicated themselves to interpreting positions of Schmidt and Kelly on whether transgender women or girls in elementary, middle school, high school and college should be banned by Kansas law from sports programs.

Schmidt said as governor he would sign legislation requiring participation to be based on a person’s gender at birth, which would disregard rights of Kansans who transitioned.

The Republican Governor’s Association PAC put it a different way, declaring Kelly opposed reasonable “efforts to ban men from competing against girls in high school sports.”

Kelly said Schmidt and his allies were distorting her veto of two “discriminatory” transgender sports bills and her belief athletic associations, including the NCAA, should set policy on student participation in sports.

“You may have seen my opponent’s attacks,” Kelly said in her latest campaign commercial. “So, let me just say it. Of course, men should not play girls sports.”

Schmidt’s campaign howled and the GOP nominee declared “she’s wrong to mislead Kansans about her real position.”

Packing a punch

The Republican Governor’s Association PAC has contributed to the Kansas conversation with seven commercials. The roster featured a piece blaming Kelly for rising crime. The ad was problematic because it relied on alarming footage of a smash-and-grab store robbery in California — not Kansas.

The Kansas Democratic Party posted to Twitter a video of Schmidt declaring: “What good does it do to fully fund schools?” That endless loop snippet didn’t contain the rest of Schmidt’s sentence: “… if you turn around and lock the children out of them?”

C.J. Grover, spokesman for the Schmidt campaign, said the Twitter item should be considered “misinformation” and reflected a “flailing and desperate” campaign.

He said the GOP nominee pledged to fund public education as required by the Kansas Constitution. However, Republicans in the state Legislature have eagerly sought election of a GOP governor who would be more friendly to reform in state financing of public schools, including diversion of tax dollars to private schools.

Emma O’Brien, spokesperson for the state Democratic Party, said there was good reason Schmidt didn’t want a spotlight directed at his record of supporting reductions in state aid to K-12 public school districts.

“It’s no surprise that Derek Schmidt and his team are panicking about Kansans learning the truth about his record,” O’Brien said. “After supporting a bill that underfunded schools in the state Senate and defending Brownback’s tax cuts to public schools as attorney general, he’s already proven that he can’t be trusted when it comes to fully funding public education. He can say whatever he wants during an election year, but the facts don’t lie.”

Put your helmets on

The volume and variety of Kansas gubernatorial commercials — embedded with questionable claims, out-of-context conclusions and misleading statements — could escalate ahead of the Nov. 8 election. The objective would be to influence the cadre of undecided voters across Kansas who might be susceptible to a well-crafted, timely attack ad.

The latest polling indicated Kelly held a small edge over Schmidt, but the gap was within the margin of error. Such a competitive race could convince organizations invested in the governor’s race to continue spending in a bid to move the needle.

More than 40 campaign ads tied to the Kansas governor’s contest have surfaced so far. In addition to the big spenders, contributors included the Democratic Governor’s Association PAC and groups known as Our Way of Life and Get Back to Work. Others that haven’t revealed themselves could break through in the final weeks of the race.

Schmidt and Kelly have released 15 commercials, and Pyle, the independent candidate for governor, last week dropped his first ad.

The conservative state senator from Hiawatha took a swipe at voting records of Schmidt and Kelly, who both served in the Kansas Senate, on a series of bills proponents believed useful in cracking down on illegal immigration.

“Derek Schmidt thinks he has you fooled,” Pyle’s spot says. “He doesn’t want you to know his bad votes on illegal immigration. No surprise, he voted every time with his buddy — Democrat Laura Kelly. Two peas in a pod.”

Kansas Reflector stories, www.kansasreflector.com, may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
See more at https://kansasreflector.com/2022/09/26/kansas-ads-in-governors-race-often-misleading-disparaging-with-a-partisan-dash-of-truth/

Legal advocacy group files ethics complaint against Schmidt tied to 2020 election lawsuit

Kansas attorney general’s office expects latest complaint to be dismissed

by Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector

Topeka — An organization dedicated to challenging lawyers accused of using the judicial system to aid President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election filed an ethics complaint against the Kansas attorney general and 14 of his peers across the country.

The 65 Project, which portrays itself as a bipartisan group, targeted Attorney General Derek Schmidt and other current or former state attorneys general for taking part in a lawsuit in 2020 viewed as a desperate search for legal loopholes leading to reversal of President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.

Michael Teter, managing director of The 65 Project, submitted a complaint Wednesday to the Kansas Office of the Disciplinary Administrator alleging Schmidt used his public office to “amplify false assertions and frivolous claims that lacked any basis in law or fact.”

The allegation was linked to Schmidt’s formal support of a lawsuit initiated by the Texas attorney general with the U.S. Supreme Court contesting administration of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. One objective was to prevent electors in those swing states from voting in the Electoral College and to potentially replace the electors with people approved by Trump.

The state of Pennsylvania responded with a brief declaring the Texas-based claim “seditious abuse” of the judicial process. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

John Milburn, spokesman for the Kansas attorney general, said The 65 Project’s action followed “multiple baseless complaints” submitted last year to the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator against Schmidt.

“All were dismissed and we expect this election-year retread will be, too,” Milburn said.

Comparable ethics complaints were filed by The 65 Project against attorneys general in Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Milburn released a March 2021 letter issued by Kansas deputy disciplinary administrator Kate Baird in response to a complaint from Georgia challenging Schmidt’s role in seeking judicial review of voting in the four swing states. It was alleged Schmidt’s signing of the 2020 legal brief was “frivolous and wholly without merit.” The state disciplinary office dismissed the complaint.

Baird said Schmidt explained he joined the effort to urge federal consideration of issues on the separation of powers. It wasn’t the first time Schmidt’s office had been involved in questions regarding the electors clause, she said.

“Our office does not have authority to substitute our judgment for that of an attorney as he or she determines whether to assert or defend a claim,” Baird said. “Our review is limited to an assessment of whether there is a good faith basis, that is not frivolous, for asserting a claim.”

She said facts of the matter didn’t demonstrate Schmidt violated ethics rules applicable to attorneys in Kansas.

In the latest complaint, The 65 Project asserted Schmidt violated four planks of the Kansas Rules of Professional Conduct. The complaint alleged Schmidt was dishonest, advanced a frivolous argument and contributed to work of others engaged in professional misconduct.

“Mr. Schmidt chose to offer his professional license and public trust to Mr. Trump’s arsenal during the latter’s assault on our democracy,” said Teter, of The 65 Project. “He cannot be shielded from the consequences of that decision simply because he holds high public office.”

The group’s complaint noted two members of Schmidt’s staff traveled in 2019 to a meeting where senior staffers of conservative state attorneys general participated in “war games” to develop post-election legal strategy in the event Trump lost reelection. The summit was put on by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, a group with ties to the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The Rule of Law Defense Fund also contributed to runup of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol with robocalls providing details to guide protesters from the White House to the Capitol in an effort to “stop the steal.” In wake of the assault, Schmidt condemned actions of rioters.

Kansas Reflector stories, www.kansasreflector.com, may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
See more at https://kansasreflector.com/2022/09/23/legal-advocacy-group-files-ethics-complaint-against-schmidt-tied-to-2020-election-lawsuit/