If the SCASD school board has any legal authority to compel people to wear medical devices, submit to medical testing, or disclose private medical information
If the SCASD school board has any legal authority to compel people to wear medical devices, submit to medical testing, or disclose private medical information
the district solicitor did not provide citations to it in his email reply to my questions.
Email reply received yesterday from the SCASD solicitor, attorney Scott Etter, in response to my questions about the source of the SCASD board/government’s claimed authority to force medical devices onto the faces of children, teachers, staff and visitors; force medical testing on children, teachers and staff; and compel disclosure of private medical information from children, teachers, staff and visitors, with denial of access to public education facilities, disciplinary or other penalties for noncompliance:
Dear Ms. Watt:
I am writing to you on behalf of the District, and in my capacity as solicitor.
I am sorry for the delay, which was my fault not that of [SCASD administrator Randy] Brown.
In general response to the general questions set forth in your initial email to Mr. Brown:
1. Students who fail or refuse to comply with the rules, regulations, or policies adopted and/or promulgated by the District will be dealt with in the same manner that the District has always dealt with students who fail or refuse to comply with rules, regulations, and policies. COVID is no different in this regard.
2. Same answer with respect to employees.
3. The District is not required to provide you with legal opinions and/or analysis, and will not be doing so, especially where, as here, you have made a veiled threat of taking legal action.
Please contact me if you have any questions about the foregoing.
In the initial email July 29, and a follow-up email August 6, I asked questions about what the legal basis is for the board believing that administrators, teachers and students have the legal authority to demand that other students, teachers and visitors wear medical devices, undergo medical testing and disclose private medical information, under penalty of disciplinary, civil or criminal consequences.
I think it's a non-response response, because Etter didn't cite any legal authority, or even provide a link to the Student Handbook or any information about which section of the Student Handbook he believes the Covid-19 ‘health and safety’ policies might fall under, in terms of disciplinary, administrative, civil or criminal consequences for noncompliance.
The only Student Handbook I can find online is for the 2020-2021 academic year, and it does not contain evidence that the school district is legally authorized to invade the bodily integrity and moral consciences of children, teachers, staff or visitors, or subject them to psychological abuse to coerce them to violate their own bodily integrity and moral consciences.
Etter’s response strongly supports the hypothesis that there is no legal basis, for any student or staff to be ordered to comply, or disciplined for noncompliance with SCASD’s adopted and promulgated masking, testing or medical disclosure policies.
There’s no general legislative statute or precedential judicial court case. There are no specific, court-authorized search warrants. There are no court orders finding any specific individual children, teachers or parents to be legally incompetent, and then granting legal custody, guardianship or control over their bodies and lives, or the bodies and lives of their children, to the school district.
Especially since the expiration/rescinding of the Governor's "emergency orders" at the state level, which emergency orders triggered the legal provisions in the two public health laws (1955 Disease Prevention and Control Law, 35 P.S.A. Section 521.1and 1978 Emergency Management Services Code, 35 Pa.C.S. §§ 7101) which in turn may have been the source of the additional powers school adminstrators and local health authorities used to originally impose the mask and testing policies.
Those state-level policies and their local derivatives may have been illegal anyway; only a few cases challenging most lockdown policies have made their way to the US Supreme Court at this point. At least one state court finally struck down mask mandates, in Florida’s First District Court of Appeals in June. A judge in Boone County, Kentucky struck down mask mandates in June as well.
Even if the US Supreme Court finds all of the policies illegal, some loud minority of the American population — likely including most members of the SCASD school board — will continue to exert their local power under the delusion that CDC spokespeople and Anthony Fauci supersede the Supreme Court.
And they will continue to act as if their own irrational fear of the many communicable respiratory diseases humans have lived with for millennia — and their own irrational belief that respiratory disease can be eliminated from the human experience — negate the God-given, Constitutionally-protected human liberties of every other person: the liberties that angry, armed, insurrectionist American Revolutionaries threw off monarchy to claim, protect and preserve for themselves and their heirs after peaceful petitioning of the government for redress had failed.
Assuming the lockdown policies of masking, testing, and medical privacy violations are illegal, immoral, unethical and unconstitutional, the school district, like the Borough of State College and other municipalities and institutions with their own policies, are entirely relying on fostering social pressure and bullying among teachers and kids to enforce masking, testing and disclosure policies, and relying on their ability to get away with it simply because they’ve gotten away with it for 18 months so far.
Just as the Borough of State College and other municipalities have — since the start of this nightmare — relied on social bullying by self-appointed civilian hall-monitors to enforce illegal, and therefore legally unenforceable, dictates. See State College Police Department comment on enforcement of state and local “mandates” and State College Police Department comment on enforcement of school district “mandates.”
If that's true, the SCASD board will continue to get away with it until teachers, parents and students routinely stop complying with these illegal dictates, call the board’s bluff and force them to shut up, back off and rescind the illegal policies, or else use the disciplinary system Etter claims — without legal citations — that they can use.
Which could, in turn, create several bases for legal action such as:
civil tort claims against the SCASD board of directors for establishing illegal, unconstitutional, discriminatory, intentionally and/or negligently tortious policies and practices;
court injunctions/cease and desist orders against individual administrators, teachers and parents who practice medicine without a license by ordering or pressuring people to put on medical devices, submit to medical testing, and take medical treatments (mRNA gene therapy injections); and
criminal assault and battery and related charges against individuals who physically lay hands on non-compliant, non-consenting children and adults, to impose compliance or ejection from public school buildings through physical force.
"No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law." ~Union Pacific Railway Co. v. Botsford (1891)
