By Kendra Ohalloran for the Tennessee Conservative

The genius of our founding fathers was not just three co-equal branches of government, but their vision for a government “for the people and by the people.” Their vision for citizen participation in government was to ensure those elected to public office are meeting the wants and needs of those they represent.

However, many parents across this country are finding significant opposition to this foundational principle, especially from those we have elected to educate our children. In one Murfreesboro parent’s case, this resulted in law enforcement intervention to prevent such participation.

Adam Williams, a father of a 7-year-old boy enrolled in Rutherford County Schools, found himself in handcuffs on Nov. 4 for “persons improperly on school premises.” He had not a warrant for his arrest, due to the school mailing the certified letter to his ex-wife’s home, in which he has never lived. Therefore, Williams was completely unaware of the charges prior to Nov. 4 when he picked his son up from school. (Additionally, the letter he received from the school system did not note these charges for “persons improperly on school premises,” but rather aggravated trespassing charges, a felony.)

Williams had decided to home-school his son for the entire 2020 school year, due to the local mask mandates. This caused significant hardship on his family, as he and his wife both work full time. During the entire 2020 school year, Williams was very vocal at the local school board meetings regarding the mask mandates.

With no mandates announced prior to the beginning of the 2021 school year, Williams re-enrolled his son into public school. About a month into the school year, Rutherford County reinstituted the mask mandate with an opt-out option, which the Williams’ chose and agreed to.

Within a few days of opting out of the mask wearing, a school nurse pulled the 7-year-old out of class due to “COVID symptoms.” A letter was sent home, requiring the student to be quarantined for 10 days, without the ability to attend school.

The problem, according to Williams, is that his son was not exhibiting any of the symptoms noted on the letter. He felt his son had been targeted due to the mask opt-out option. Williams initially gave the school the benefit of the doubt regarding their decision, but after attending several school board meetings and hearing similar stories from other parents, he was convinced that his family had likely been unjustly targeted.

On his son’s first day back to school, Williams requested to speak with the school nurse and the principal regarding this discrepancy and concerns over the inaccuracies. Especially due to the contact tracing measures sending hundreds of kids home during any given week, the learning loss seen across the state of Tennessee would continue to increase.

The principal then met Williams in the school lobby, in front of his 7-year-old son, and became so aggressive that Williams asked her to step backwards out of his personal space. Williams said at no point in this encounter did he become belligerent as this all played out in front of his son. He left and made a formal complaint against the principal to the Rutherford County director of schools. After six weeks since filing this complaint, Williams still has not received a response from the director of schools.

Williams then decided to do a deep dive into the background of the director of schools and found some “uncomfortable” things about him, which he decided to list on a poster board to bring to the next scheduled school board meeting.

Any public servant whose salary is paid by the taxpayers of Rutherford County, including the director of schools and its principals, are subject to scrutiny, same as any other public official. But, as many conservatives have found these last two years, the authority structure we have put into place does not like to be challenged, and they seemingly loathe the idea of mass citizen participation.

After the school board meeting on Oct. 20, Williams picked his son up from the after-school program and passed his principal on the way out. He told her that he did move forward with a formal complaint. She then responded with “it doesn’t matter.”

Two weeks later, Williams was arrested for aggravated felony trespassing for picking up his son after school. He has not only been banned from the school campus, but banned from any functions, sporting events or offsite events related to his son’s school as well. Instead of increasing communication regarding such matters, the Rutherford County School board (evidently) chose to escalate via local law enforcement.

Unfortunately, our legislature in the great state of Tennessee has left it up to the parents to fight for parents’ rights. But this parent is not backing down and will be fighting for his parental rights in court.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but rather what we ought. Let us have faith that right makes might and, in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Williams hopes that many Tennesseans, especially parents, will rise to the occasion.