Dear Cal School Board members,
I expect some of you have seen the news stories about a lawsuit filed by a school librarian in Lowell against a parent who has for years been accusing her of grooming and giving porn to children. If not, you might view and read these reports:
Here in the Caledonia district, we have also over the last several years heard parents and others allege falsehoods against textbooks, library books, and teachers. The chief agitator here in Caledonia has been Angela Rigas, currently state representative for this district. Some current members of our school board—that is, some of you—have publicly aligned with Rigas, participated in organizations and social media forums that she has organized or led, and relied on her support in your election campaigns. To the credit of the board and the district leadership as a whole, you have not yet taken the sorts of actions that she advocates. The current proposals to create an anti-masking policy and to add Kallman Legal to the district’s stable of attorneys appear to be the latest Rigas-inspired ideas. I hope you will reject both.
I encourage you to note the similarity between Rigas’s ideology and rhetoric and that of Stephanie Boone, the defendant in the lawsuit mentioned above. I encourage you to watch developments in that case. And I would urge you to distance yourself from such slanders and from the people who voice them. You don’t need to ally yourself with those people, or adopt or condone those tactics, in order to serve Caledonia parents and students. You will do better to rely on your own judgment, as I believe you all to some extent do. I believe that as people who have followers and supporters, you have a duty as leaders to make it clear to them that you reject such tactics.
But I fear the spell of Angela Rigas is not yet broken here. So I would like to call your attention to several statements I have made over these last several years exposing false and malicious accusations emanating from Angela Rigas and some of her followers.
The longest and most carefully written statement I have posted is titled “Always Running: Sex, Integrity, and Caledonia Community Schools.” I posted it October 26, 2024, in response to a dramatic performance by Angela Rigas in the prior month’s school board meeting. Here’s the link:
I encourage you to read it and consider it carefully. I think it might take you around twenty minutes to read. If that’s all you have time for: fine. It says most of what I think needs to be said about Boone-type slanders against books in school libraries or in teachers’ classroom collections, and against our conscientious educators.
If you have additional time, you could read the dossier stemming from my responses to the false accusations in 2022 of two Caledonians against new history textbooks adopted for use in Caledonia High School:
But stepping away from the personalities and details described above, I would offer this for your consideration: Within the constituencies of Caledonia Community Schools, we have differences of opinion, style, and conviction. But the basic struggle is not between liberals and conservatives. The basic struggle is not between Christians and non-Christians. Rather, the basic struggle—a struggle that each of us must wage first within our own hearts—is between truth and falsehood; between integrity and hypocrisy; between patience and reactivity; between thoughtfulness and shallowness; between gratitude and grievance; and between charity and malice, or, put more plainly, between love and hate. Calling yourself a conservative or a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, a Christian or an atheist, or any other label, does not guarantee that you will be on the right side of any of these polarities. This is a matter for constant self-examination for all of us.
The lawsuit filed in Lowell two days ago, and the support it has drawn from the community, may be a warning as to where the downward spiral can tend when we fail to monitor and correct our own thoughts and words, or to take heed as to whose leadership we follow in these matters. We do not know how that lawsuit will end. But we should be able to realize that the utterances that brought it about should have gone unspoken and unwritten, and should have been rebuked by leaders of whatever moral or religious communities their originator may claim to represent. Condoning such speech by one’s allies is hardly better than voicing it oneself.
Respectfully yours, and with gratitude for your service,
James Ernest
Verba Sparsa 