Peach Tree Times

Four Georgia education unions refused to comment on a memo issued earlier this month by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. attorneys regarding “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school administrators, board members, faculty, and staff.

Garland wrote that the threats against public servants are illegal.

 "The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate," he said. 

Peach Tree Times reached out to the Association of Professional Educators, the Georgia Association of Educators, the Georgia Federation of Teachers and Savannah Federation of Teachers to discuss the memo but received no responses.

Garland issued the memo in response to the National School Boards Association (NSBA) recently writing the Biden Administration regarding "threats, harassment, disruption and acts of intimidation," including “school board meetings [being] disrupted in California, Florida, Georgia, and other states because of local directives for mask coverings to protect students and educators from COVID-19.”

Garland’s memo did not mention which specific incidents would warrant a federal investigation but he wrote: "I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district within 30 days of the issuance of this memorandum. These meetings will facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response."

Mask mandates have been a hot-button issue around the country since students returned to the classroom.  Parents on both sides of the issue have clashed with school officials on policies and procedures.  In the eyes of NSBA, some parents have become threatening and overstepped when criticizing the decisions of school officials.

 “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach," Democrat Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe recently said in a gubernatorial debate.

 The comment came in a response to a question of what say parents have in a student's education, transgendered students and library books.

McAuliffe continued, “I'm not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions."

His opponent, Republican Glenn Youngkin, posted on Twitter that he believes "parents should be in charge of their kids' education."

Senior Fellow Andrew C. McCarthy recently wrote in the National Review that the First Amendment protects free speech in all cases except when "it unambiguously calls for the use of force that the speaker clearly intends, under circumstances in which the likelihood of violence is real and imminent. Even actual “threats of violence” are not actionable unless they meet this high threshold."