PELSB Lawsuit: Stand Up

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Hundreds stood up against PELSB in the rulemaking hearings, now is the time to stand for judicial review of that defective process.

Complete the form, below, to be potentially contacted by our (ESA) legal team about our possibly defending your rights, too.

We are happy to communicate developments to you regularly about PELSB or our case or send you information specifically about standing up in court. Complete the form on this page, below, for information about possibly receiving no-cost protection of your rights, with others.

There is no fee for receiving information from us (ESA).

Completing the form below is simply providing information for our legal team to potentially contact you, about possibly representing you or someone, in this anticipated and in-planning lawsuit against PELSB or other State of Minnesota agencies or related parties. There is no promise, by anyone's completion of this form that there is a lawsuit or that ESA will file a lawsuit on your behalf or that you are or would automatically be a plaintiff in any suit. At no point would you owe fees to ESA for contacting you, communicating with you, nor if ESA would represent you as a plaintiff standing against PELSB. ESA, by completion of this form, or anywhere on this website, is not acting as your attorney--legal advice would come from an attorney of the ESA team upon subsequent conversations. Anyone is free to consult with Minnesota attorneys about their rights--which is not changed by submitting this form. ESA does not and cannot provide any general legal services at variance with our specific program missions. In this situation of the PELSB trangressions, the affected class of plaintiffs may be large and additional and a variety of plaintiffs may strenghen aspects of the case and, possibly, bring greater justice for all, so please feel welcomed to submit the following form. Though an individual's injury may warrant damages from certain legal means, this particular type of case may not be intended to recover damages, and, instead, is primarily oriented to the injunctive remedy of stopping this PELSB Rulemaking (R-4615) and, thus, would be unlikely to bear any judgment of money damages.

Prejudice Against Teachers
This PELSB rulemaking would impact current licensed teachers whose employers are public schools or whose employers maintain equivalent human resources policies with public schools, which may include most private school teachers.

PELSB did not give teachers the opportunity to comment on how this would impact them, first of all, as they have outrageously denied there is an impact, from which they have retreated, somewhat.

The fact is that the Minnesota Statutes control there is an impact to current teachers--they can be fired, not renewed, demoted, et cetera on the basis of being measured to these policies PELSB is improperly seeking to impose outside of the lawful process.

Was PELSB ignorant of this when it started this rulemaking? Was it, instead, the idea of the union or Department of Education to use PELSB to implement this rulemaking to go after teachers who refused to preach discriminatory ideology demanded of "cultural" authorities, et cetera?

Regardless of whose idea it was, teachers would be vulnerable to seemingly legal discrimination for not preaching make believe social justice narratives.

Moreover, these standards are vague, and could be used to fire any teacher targeted, regardless of whether or not they are "on the boat."

A final summary point is that PELSB is overtly racially prejudiced, openly declaring that regarding the impact to the supply of teacher candidates of this rulemaking proposal, PELSB is happy if this rulemaking were only to increase nonwhite teachers. Furthermore, PELSB overtly says that a nonwhite teacher is, in its view, a better teacher than a white teacher.
Click to go to the summary of impact and lack of required notice to teachers section.
Safeguarding Children from Woke Experimentation
The PELSB proposal is full of language suggesting requirements of teachers being taught to go too far in various respects of the personal and family privacy and autonomy.

Telling teachers they must base teaching on a child's home life mandates an inclination to pry into home life.

Telling teachers they must affirm any potential queer or trans identities suggests a role for teachers that would exceed the ethical limits of a trained and licensed psychotherapist.

Telling teachers they must affirm and promote skin-color based identities upon students, regardless of whether the child is rightly or wishes to be so categorized according to self-proclaimed culture authorities can easily harm a student.

Grading based on a woke "culture-group" curve, where grades are adjusted according to the teachers' pseudo-scientific theories of equity will not be fair or productive to any students.

The new rules look to teachers to be life coaches. They see academics as incidental--better leave education for national media--what students need is a social-parent to care about the ones who deserve the attention.

The new proposal emphasizes how now individualization of teaching is paramount. Well, that does not really prioritize the most productive teaching, which is focused what works best for all students. But, again, PELSB is concerned about certain students, over others.
Read more
Receive Info Re: Standing Up to PELSB
It would be helpful, and necessary, on certain claims, to have teachers, impacted parents, and concerned citizens sign up to receive information or contact from our legal team about potentially standing up with us and others in court.
Fill out this form to receive information or contact
Cornered, PELSB has Resorted to Fraud
We noticed (i.e. reported) in our primary written comment (around 10 pages of very specific legal briefing) following the 24 August 2022 Hearing that PELSB was clearly without the necessary authorization step, required, for the proposed rulemaking to validly proceed.

In their Rebuttal directly to our argument, PELSB sought to deflect from the all-encompassing analysis we presented by focusing on one point and saying the Statutes contained language different than we represented. The problem is, the PELSB direct quotation was fraudulent. That is not what that Statute says and it is a world of difference.

ALJ Mortenson simply takes PELSB word for it--ignoring all the details we presented and, literally, cites the bogus language PELSB included.

This clearly establishes the judgment of ALJ Mortenson being based on errant material.
Read more.
The Pending Rulemaking R-4615 from PELSB
The rulemaking that is the primary concern of all these pages about PELSB and the public comment is identified by the designation R-4615. R-4615 contains a number of different parts, but the primary issue of concern is the replacement of the current pedagogical training standards (the, "SEP," as they are commonly referenced) with a new set PELSB calls the "CRTP: Culturally Responsive Teaching Principles."
Read more here
Imbalance of the Separated Powers
Fundamentally, this is a situation where the Executive Branch is systemically exceeding its authority and usurping the powers of the other branches of government, which calls for the Courts reining in the Executive and setting it back within its proper bounds, at least with respect to the transgressions involved in this situation.

PELSB is giving itself the Legislature's powers and is ignoring the statutory limitations, specific to it and specific to rulemaking.

OAH has suggested in the written statement of Chief ALJ Starr that OAH views agencies as having authority to set out policies for their own operation and quasi-adjudication based on a concept of "proximate areas" of government--Her Honor's language implies PELSB can make any rules (not explicitly forbidden, presumably) "related" to teacher licensure, at any time.

As OAH demonstrates itself to have lost touch with the Statutes that are the basis of its existence and of which it is supposed to be quasi-adjudicating matters, clearly OAH has ventured well off the permissible course and the Courts must take a firm hand and re-set OAH--if not require a more drastic re-organization of OAH and rulemaking--as would alternatively be appropriate.
See more about the basis of valid rulemaking (Statutes Chapter 14)
The Invalidating Notice Deficiency
By Minnesota Statutes § 14.14, if a rulemaking fails to accurately provide notice to interested parties or persons who should have received accurate notice to enable their fair opportunity to participate in the rulemaking hearing, to the extent of risk of prejudice to the person to whom accurate notice was not given, the rulemaking must begin, again, this time with proper notice.

Here, teachers are obviously interested, as their jobs and licenses depend on evaluations measured by this material and the material is considerably bearing risk of prejudice to certain teachers and all teachers (given the vagueness and potential of any teacher to fail to affirm to an identity, correctly, or fail the correct "cultural response" required to any situation).

But, teachers were not all notified, and those teachers who were able to participate were maliciously told there was no impact to them--in the seeming obviousness of the applicability.

So, there was no valid or sufficient notice to any teachers in the process and all licensed teachers should have been notified.
Read more here
The Invalidating Lack of Authorization
By Minnesota Statutes § 14.[05], an agency (in this case, PELSB) must have specific authorization from the Legislature to engage in the specific rulemaking to the extent and scope authorized.
Read more here
Invalidating Lack of Articulating Basis for Changes

Questions about standing up against PELSB?