North Carolina’s Kitty Hawk Middle School barred a mother from having any access inside the building unless she was willing to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement. As first reported by the Daily Caller, Amber Longacre filed a complaint with the Judson Independent School District that even a student resource officer was pushing her to just sign.
As her complaint read, “Texas law is clear that parents are to ‘be encouraged to actively participate in creating and implementing educational programs for their children.’ Unfortunately, it appears that Judson ISD has implemented a visitor check-in policy that is inconsistent with this state mandate.”
The photos the Daily Caller obtained of the NDA show that the document is asking her to keep everything she sees at the school secret. As Aaron Terr, director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) explains, this is something that businesses use to protect trade secrets or exclusive ideas. Not for education.
Given the fact that this is a public school, the First Amendment prevents them from telling people they cannot discuss the school or what goes on in the school.
When confronted, the assistant superintendent claimed it was put in place to protect children but wouldn’t say from what. Longacre kept pushing the issue and felt like the district was forcing the issue and taking advantage of unsuspecting parents. “I started thinking about all the people who were in a hurry … It made me really nervous to think there were so many people who were signing it without even realizing what it was. I told them that, and they laughed at me. When they [laughed at me] I knew that something needed to be done.”
On August 22nd, legal reps from the district contacted Longacre to tell her that they had removed the requirement from their system. They claimed it was a standard document with the system.
