Contributor: Delmarva Parent Teacher Coalition

The Wicomico County Board of Education and Somerset County Board of Education are among the Maryland school districts to join a class action lawsuit against social media companies that include TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and others. In the suit, they are claiming that social media platforms adversely affect students' academic performance and mental health. Although the Delmarva Parent Teacher coalition strongly agrees with that claim, there remains a big conflict within these school districts.

The school system has absolutely no say over what a private company does. The school system cannot control what a parent or child does outside of school. It's the parent that gives their child the smartphone, tablet, or computer, subscribes to the service, and decides what their child can or cannot access on the Internet, including social media platforms. The parent is ultimately responsible, not the social media platforms.

Therefore, the school system has absolutely no legal standing to make a claim against any social media company that they did not directly subscribe or were directly brought harm. Of course, their board lawyer already informed them of that, so they are fully aware.

Those that oversee the school districts all contradict themselves, as they too are adversely affecting students' academic performance and mental health through the use of obscene materials and the sexualization of students in our K-12 schools. This problem is something that the boards have full control and can easily fix, but they fail to address this issue or define the word “appropriate.” Now, they want to point a finger without at least doing their part.

Superintendent Micah Stauffer of Wicomico County Public Schools, who's married to a pastor at Emmanuel Church (Wesleyan) Fruitland campus, made a comment on the impact of social media on students in a news report:

"We see and hear and experience that each and every day. It's impacting them through depression, anxiety, even a lack of focus in what they're doing."

Meanwhile, Stauffer hypocritically continues to foster a hostile school environment, exposes children to sexually-explicit content, promotes sex changes, and gender-identity indoctrination to children under his direction. We've discovered that superintendents from other Maryland school districts that have joined the lawsuit are also like-minded.

The school should be a safe haven to protect children from such harm, and should be an innocent and nurturing environment focused on academic proficiency. Instead, it is a hotbed of political indoctrination and child exploitation. “You should see what children access on their smartphones” liberal union teachers will say in order to justify the obscene content they expose our kids to.

In addition, there seems to be no concern that children can access things they shouldn't while in class using school-issued laptops. Instead of teaching the class, many teachers let the children freely surf the web after completing an assignment in Google Classroom just to pass the time until the bell rings for the next class. There also seems to be no concern that precious time is wasted in the class, yet the boards are approving more tax-payer dollars on contracted educational solutions to fill these "educational gaps" that they've created.

The big question is, is the school board and its administration really concerned about these social media platforms affecting students' academic performance and mental health, or is it really about money?

In this news report, Micah Stauffer, Superintendent of Wicomico County Public Schools stated:

"We know that in this area we have a serious lack of mental health resources in this community, so that's something that if there's funding that comes through this lawsuit to Wicomico County Public Schools, we can help use that to address the mental health needs that we're seeing in our students." 

How do these school boards think this will end? The social media giants are going nowhere. They know that. These boards hope that they can collectively extort the social media companies and be pacified by money to go away. This game is clearly about money.

Meanwhile, they are using our tax dollars for their own legal expenses when it comes to their own gain, while using the same legal budget against parents when it comes to defending themselves against the actual damage that they have done and continue to do to children and their families. We've yet to see our school boards sue the State of Maryland for encroaching on local authority and abusing parental rights. But this is how they roll, while they continue to waste taxpayer dollars with a frivolous lawsuit.

We would love to see every parent remove their child from these social media platforms, but that’s none of our business. As taxpayers, the educational materials used in the school and the effort to indoctrinate them has had an effect on our children's academic performance and mental health, and that is our business.

What’s so ironic is that the school district wants to dictate what others do outside of school, yet they don’t want others dictating to them what they should be doing (or not doing) inside our schools. As for suing the social media giants in a game of hypocrisy, good luck.

Fellows & Editors

February 15, 2024. DelmarvaPTC.org.

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