Lee’s Summit schools attorney blasts Missouri AG Schmitt for threat on COVID rules
In a scathing letter, an attorney for Lee’s Summit schools says Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has no legal authority to order districts to drop their COVID-19 mask mandates and quarantine rules.
Schmitt, who is running for U.S. Senate, had sent cease and desist letters to dozens of school districts across the state threatening legal action if they do not drop their health orders. But in his own letter in response, Lee’s Summit’s attorney, Joseph Hatley, told Schmitt that the threats “not only lack legal effect— they are simply wrong.”
“Every COVID mitigation effort the District has undertaken has been guided by science, and has been aimed at ensuring that students can, to the greatest extent possible, receive in-person instruction,” Hatley wrote to Schmitt.
“The Board (of Education) will continually evaluate its response to the COVID pandemic based on available and reliable data. The Board also shares your stated objective of supporting parental involvement in their children’s education — it just recognizes its responsibility to represent a wider range of voices than those you are publicizing.”
On Monday, Schmitt responded and said the “school district should come into compliance with state law immediately.”
“The need for citizens to balance freedom and responsibility does not give you the right to do the balancing for parents and their schoolchildren,” Schmitt wrote. “You may believe that the public welfare calls for balancing away students’ freedoms for control measures; but that approach invites true lawlessness.”
The Lee’s Summit district continues to require masks in pre-kindergarten and elementary school buildings through Dec. 21. But officials agreed to make masks optional in other buildings last month.
The attorney general is calling the school districts’ mitigation measures illegal following a Cole County court ruling last month that stripped local health authorities of their powers to issue public health orders.
Judge Daniel Green wrote that a decades-old state health department administrative rule, allowing it to delegate disease-control authority to local health departments, was unconstitutional because it gave rule-making powers to unelected officials.
But several Kansas City area school officials say Schmitt does not have the authority to enforce his demand because the rules were created by locally elected school boards. Or in the case of Kansas City Public Schools, the City Council implemented a mask requirement for schools.
Lee’s Summit, Kansas City Public Schools, North Kansas City, Liberty, Park Hill and several other districts previously defended their health orders and said they would remain in place.
The Smithville and Kearney school boards on Monday were scheduled to discuss their COVID protocols in response to the letters. Platte County and other districts also could address the matter at their meetings this week.
Schmitt also encouraged parents to report to his office any districts that continue to enforce COVID-19 rules. He sent dozens of school districts cease and desist letters in response to complaints that they are continuing to follow pandemic protocols.
“After carefully weighing the scientific evidence many have determined that the biggest risk to their child’s health and future is in fact the failure to be provided with a learning environment free of distractions and impediments created by forced masking, condescending vaccine moralizing and disruptive quarantines,” Schmitt wrote in the cease and desist letters.
In Lee’s Summit’s response, Hatley said the school board “will not abandon its statutory duty to govern the operations of the school district. If you follow through on your threat to sue the District, we will defend that suit vigorously.”
He wrote that the district is “committed first and foremost to the health and safety of its staff and students. Every COVID mitigation effort the District has undertaken has been guided by science, and has been aimed at ensuring that students can, to the greatest extent possible, receive in-person instruction. The Board is equally committed to standing up for its teachers, principals, and support staff against baseless attacks on the Board’s legal authority to act in accordance with Missouri law in protecting them against a disease that has killed over 15,000 Missourians.”
Hatley wrote that Schmitt has “no legal authority to direct the District to cease and desist what it is doing to mitigate COVID. You cite no such authority in your letter, because there is none.”
He also emphasized that the “Missouri Legislature has expressly granted local boards of education wide-ranging power to manage and govern their own affairs, power that you have no authority to interfere with.”
“While the District acknowledges that people have certain rights, it teaches its students the fundamental notion that rights must be balanced against the obligation to exercise them responsibly, and in a manner that does not violate the rights of others,” Hatley wrote to Schmitt. “Your invocation of ‘rights’ untethered to an obligation to exercise them responsibly invites lawlessness. This is especially pernicious coming from your office, because of the outsized weight some may attach to your opinions.”
On Monday, Schmitt replied that Hatley had a “constitutionally problematic reading of state law.”
“Aside from the clear legal reasoning, it is my firm belief that health decisions and mask decisions are best left to parents, not school administrators or government bureaucrats,” Schmitt wrote.
Includes reporting by The Star’s Jeanne Kuang.
This story was originally published December 13, 2021 at 4:45 PM.
