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WELLESLEY, Mass. — Alleging racial segregation and suppression of student speech, conservative nonprofit group Parents Defending Education (PDE) has filed a lawsuit against the public school district of Wellesley, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.
The Daily Signal reports:
Parents Defending Education filed the lawsuit against the Boston-area Wellesley Public Schools Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts — a lawsuit that specifically targets both the racially segregated student groups and the school’s speech policies.
“Nearly seven decades of Supreme Court precedent have made two things clear,” said the lawsuit. “Public schools cannot segregate students by race, and students do not abandon their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse gate. [Wellesley Public Schools] is flouting both of these principles.”
Furthermore, the suit charges district schools with using the pretense of “racial equity” to justify neo-segregationist practices, alleging them to have sponsored, hosted, and promoted events for “affinity groups” intended specifically for students of certain races, and from which white students were denied entry.
The suit argues that this constitutes a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race-based discrimination in programs or activities receiving federal funds, as well as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, whose Equal Protection Clause prohibits states from denying equal protection under the law, as well as from enacting laws which abridge natural rights to life, liberty, or property absent the due process of law.
Wellesley Public Schools also faces allegations of First Amendment violations stemmed from a “bias reporting system” that allows students to report “conduct, speech, or expression … [that] demonstrates conscious or unconscious bias that targets individuals or groups that are part of a federally protected class,” which students apparently began weaponizing against those whose politics they disagreed with, with one parent alleging their child to have stopped speaking in class entirely as a result of the policy.
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