Officials at Pacific Justice Institute have announced they have gone to court to try to reach a resolution in a fight between the Florida Citizens Alliance and the Broward County Public Schools, which has declined to comply with public records requests intended to determine whether the district is exposing children to pornography.
PJI said it filed the action against the school district on behalf of FLCA, which is a nonprofit group that supports K-12 education reform, because it wanted to update parents on how public schools are failing their students by allowing exposure to porn.
“FLCA compiles lists of books geared toward K-12 students that FLCA believes are pornographic and attempts to find which public schools use those books. Many of the books on FLCA’s lists contain detailed drawings of people engaged in sexual acts,” PJI explained.
As recently as 2019, FLCA confirmed that BCPS had 82% of the listed books available to their students.
This year, FLCA compiled a new list of 42 books and asked PJI to file public records requests to discover if BCPS possesses any of the listed books and where those books are located, the legal team explained.
“But BCPS has subjected FLCA and PJI’s Florida staff attorney, Alexander Bumbu, to two months of multilayer bureaucracy without producing all of the requested records. BCPS has stonewalled FLCA by misconstruing the requests, despite Bumbu correcting them on multiple occasions, and not informing Bumbu about which employee(s) are ultimately responsible for collecting the records requested,” PJI said.
After weeks of delays, a school official conceded that the district has a central database of schools and said it would take only hours to access that information. But no records ever were released.
Then a few hours after the lawsuit was launched the school “claimed to have the records ready,” but, PJI noted, officials “still failed to fully comply with the public records request.”
“Under Florida law, BCPS is responsible for monitoring the materials used in its schools, and Floridians have a clear right to see those materials,” explained the lawyer. “FLCA is doing what any parent would do if they were concerned about what their child is being exposed to in school. BCPS is undermining Floridians’ rights to access public records. It’s imperative that a public example be made of BCPS, to show that public school districts can and should be held accountable for disregarding the right to access public records.”
The legal team noted Florida’s public records law is broad and focuses on requiring that, “All state, county, and municipal records are open for personal inspection and copying by any person.”
Exempted are specific legal documents, but the school’s records don’t meet those requirements.
“Without question, Broward County Public Schools is breaching parental trust by their continued unwillingness to comply with Florida public records law,” said PJI chief Brad Dacus. “In a court of law, PJI’s attorney, Alexander Bumbu, will hold them accountable for their actions on behalf of Florida’s parents.”
The same issue has cropped up multiple times in the past. WND reported in a series of stories just a few years ago how a legal fight developed in Colorado over a school district’s decision to give children access to an online database that contained offensive material.
A lawsuit at the time named EBSCO, the online library company, for allegedly brokering “pornographic database to schools and libraries.”
It was the Cherry Creek School District that at that time discontinued its contract with EBSCO after parents complained.
Information that had been available to students included “How to have oral sex,” “How to have anal sex” and “How to have vaginal sex.”
The non-profit MassResistance discovered EBSCO works with 55,000 schools.
“We’ve often reported on the dramatic influx of ‘comprehensive sex-ed’ into schools across the country in recent years despite vocal outrage by parents,” the group said. “The graphic sexual content and LGBT tips that schools are pushing at students has been very disturbing for some time now, and is getting much worse.”
MassResistance said children attending middle schools in the Cherry Creek School District were “being given access to extremely graphic sexual and homosexual pornography, material encouraging them to become sexually and homosexually active, descriptions of ‘sex toys,’ and much more.”
MassResistance founder Brian Camenker said he was independently able to reproduce the results uncovered by the Cherry Creek parents.
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