Group sues Collier County schools over textbook selection

Brett Murphy | Naples

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Three parents sued the Collier County School Board on Wednesday over new textbooks slated for public classrooms next fall.

Along with factual errors, flaws and omissions, the parents said in the court filing, the board selects books and reviews the materials "behind closed doors to the exclusion of the public."

The suit, filed in the 20th Circuit Court for Collier County, calls for an "emergency injunction" on the books and the School Board's selection process. The suit contends the board violated state transparency laws and education standards.

"The selection process for the textbooks that the board is trying to push through is flawed," Eric Konuk, 55, said.

Konuk, the father of four children in the school system, is one of the parents who brought the suit. The two other named plaintiffs are local lawyers who filed the suit with the Florida Citizens Alliance.

The issue at heart is a new batch of textbooks, the first major change in almost 10 years of curriculum.

The school district’s Instructional Materials Committee has been meeting since the start of the school year to decide which textbooks made the cut.

The materials selected by the committee were approved by the state and have been available for public review since March.

The School Board unanimously approved the committee's recommendations in April.

Seven people, including the three named in the suit, have filed formal protests through the School Board's official channels.

They have identified 222 words and passages they think are problematic in the incoming textbooks, from upper-level law and history books to elementary social studies materials.

School Board attorneys declined to comment because they haven't had time to read through the lawsuit.

But board member Eric Carter said most of the issues parents have flagged are either easily vetted or inherently subjective.

He cited one complaint a parent made, arguing that women did not fight in the Revolutionary War. Carter quickly referred to the night of Nov. 16, 1776, when Margaret Corbin took a bullet to the shoulder while she was stuffing cannons for colonial residents.

"That took three minutes on Google," he said.

Keith Flaugh, with Florida Citizens Alliance, didn't lodge an official protest with the School Board but said he spent 20 hours with a 900-page book and identified 120 issues.

“The whole book is slanted toward teaching our kids we’re a democracy," he said. "But that’s not true. We’re a constitutional republic.”

While technically accurate, Carter said, issues like that are more confusing than correct, especially considering modern terms such as the People's Republic of China.

"It’s splitting hairs here," he said. "I just don’t think that it's this big of a deal."

Brantley Oakey, a lawyer and parent named in the suit, said in a blog post that one law book passage gives undue deference to the Affordable Care Act and that another section "condition(s) our children to believe in the Marxist idea of positive rights."

But the issues they have raised aren't political, Flaugh said in a written statement circulated Wednesday.

"It is about our children's future, following Florida laws and adopting factual, unbiased textbooks that are not used to indoctrinate our children."

On Thursday, the School Board will host a special hearing for all seven parents to present their cases for further review. It will begin at 4 p.m. at the the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Administrative Center, 5775 Osceola Trail, North Naples.

But even the format of the hearing is unfair, the parents argued in the court filing, because it gives them 10 minutes each to explain hundreds of pages of what they consider problems.