A legal assault against woke educational insanity led by a modern patriot named Doug Turpin has just scored a significant win.
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Doug and Nicole Turpin, founders of Coalition for Liberty, enrolled their children at Charlotte Latin believing they were buying a traditional, rigorous, apolitical education at one of the state’s most prestigious private schools. Then came the summer of 2020.
After George Floyd overdosed on fentanyl, prompting propagandistic cries of “defund the police,” the school sent parents a letter that the Turpins believed signaled a clear move “toward a curriculum, culture, and focus associated with a political agenda.”
That same month, Latin began distributing a video series titled “Conversations about Race.” On the Fourth of July, Headmaster Charles Baldecchi sent a letter reflecting on a high school prank from his youth that he now described as “horrific” when viewed “in today’s lens.”
The school’s leftist charge accelerated. Curriculum, reading materials, and classroom policies shifted in ways the Turpins and other parents saw as the adoption of an anti-American political agenda. According to the plaintiffs’ complaint, the school taught their sixth-grade child polarizing concepts such as “Republicans are white supremacists.”
The school required young students to read disgusting, age-inappropriate books on sexuality and gender identity. The school sold the parents on a classical education but switched to an intense focus on “diversity, inclusion, equity” and progressive ideology at one of the state’s most prestigious private schools.
Concerned parents, including the Turpins, formed a group called Refocus Latin. After being promised that there would be no retaliation against them or their children, they presented a PowerPoint to the school’s trustees outlining their objections. The board listened, thanked them, and then cut off further dialogue.
Behind the scenes, the headmaster allegedly told faculty and administrators that the presentation was “an attack on our community with the intention of ripping its fabric apart” and accused the parents of acting in “bad faith.” Faculty were instructed not to discuss curriculum or culture concerns with parents and to refer them instead to the administration.
The Turpins later raised specific concerns about one teacher’s COVID masking policy and what they described as “indoctrination on progressive ideology.” Again they sought — and received — assurances of no retaliation. In an email, the school stated, “Our teachers do not retaliate and there will be no blowback, I assure you.”
Days later, during an in-person meeting, the head of school informed Doug Turpin that the family’s children were being disenrolled. The stated reason: irreconcilable ideological differences over the school’s diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives in enrollment and hiring. Incredibly, the children were required to leave that same day.
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Charlotte Latin had surrendered to the left-wing gods of political correctness and wokism. Rather than defending classical education, open inquiry, and the right of parents to raise respectful questions about curriculum, the school treated dissenting parents as the problem. It cited the fine print of an enrollment contract to silence them and then, according to the complaint, made false statements about the parents’ presentation — claiming that it contained racist assertions that minority students and faculty “have not earned their positions” — that the Turpins say damaged their reputations.
Doug Turpin could have withdrawn his children and moved on. Instead, he chose the harder, nobler road, putting his resources, time, and reputation on the line so that other parents — those without the means — might one day have a fighting chance when a private school decides to ram left-wing ideological conformity down their throats.
This past Friday, the North Carolina Supreme Court refused to let prestigious Charlotte Latin School bury a lawsuit brought by parents who dared to question the school’s sharp leftward turn. In a 5-2 decision written by Justice Richard Dietz and joined by Chief Justice Paul Newby and Justices Phil Berger, Jr.; Tamara Barringer; and Trey Allen, the Court reversed key parts of lower-court rulings that had thrown out the Turpins’ claims. The case allows the family to pursue claims for breach of contract, fraud, unfair and deceptive trade practices, and defamation.
The trial judge who dismissed most of the case was registered “independent,” and the Court of Appeals panel that affirmed that dismissal was Democrat. The five justices who reversed them and kept the parents’ claims alive are Republicans. Parents across North Carolina should remember that the next time they hear someone claim that “judges just apply the law.”
Thanks to the North Carolina Supreme Court, Charlotte Latin is about to get fully exposed in public for its radicalism, and for displaying offensive “artwork” disrespectful to Christianity on its walls, with no rulings from Democrat judges to help hide its communistic shenanigans. In one instance, “artwork” that suddenly began to appear in the school pictured Jesus with his throat cut and black blood flowing out from his body with the words “God is Dead.”
This sort of anti-Christian, anti-Western, and anti-American nonsense is not what the parents bargained for when they plopped down considerable dollars of tuition money for a classical education to focus on calculus, logic, and Western literature.
In the book The Naked Communist, published in 1958, former FBI agent W. Cleon Skousen warned of 45 areas of American society that leftists would infiltrate to undermine the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution and destroy our constitutional republic.
And what sat atop the list of battlegrounds for leftist conquest? The American educational system — not just in public schools, but also, perhaps even more, the most private and expensive education that money can buy.
Doug Turpin recognized the leftist power play to transform Latin into an indoctrination factory, and has done his part to stop it. The North Carolina Supreme Court has now done its part.
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It’s time for the rest of us to join the battle.
Image via Picryl.