A bizarre and disturbing story has emerged from Scottsdale, Arizona involving a secret dossier of information gathered about parents of students in the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) community who have objected to mask mandates and the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the district’s schools.
The dossier appears as a Google Drive file on a computer in the home shared by SUSD school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg and his father, Mark Greenburg.
According to the Daily Independent which broke the story on November 9, the dossier includes photos of district parents and at least one minor, and personal financial documents, including professional certifications and mortgage statements. The files also reveal that those tracking the parents’ information are having parents followed in public places and keeping documentation.
A few of the files contained labels such as “SUSD Wackos” and “Anti Mask Lunatics.”
The dossier was inadvertently revealed in an email Jann-Michael Greenburg sent to a Scottsdale resident named Kim Stafford back in August.
Both SUSD and Jann-Michael Greenburg, whose official title is Governing Board President, are distancing themselves from the dossier.
In a letter from SUSD to parents on November 10, the district stated, “While the existence of the site and its public record contents may raise concern, such activities are not within the purview of the Scottsdale Unified School District to control and are unrelated to the district’s task of providing future-focused, world-class learning opportunities to our 22,000 Pre-K‒12 students.”
“I categorically deny having anything to do with any of this,” Jann-Michael Greenburg told the Daily Independent. “If you are going to claim in a story right now, that I had anything to do with this, I would argue that crosses the line.”
The dossier also contains videos, apparently created by Mark Greenburg, the father. One shows him on August 24 taking photographs of parents and children prior to a school board meeting. He is also recorded talking to some parents.
“They don’t know it’s me … I covered up my license plate,” Mark Greenburg says in the video, in which he’s wearing a body camera on his motorcycle jacket.
“Somewhere around here we have a private investigator who’s writing down all of their plates.”
When Jann-Michael Greenburg was asked whether his father had access to the Google Drive in question, he responded, “I am not my father’s keeper.”
One mother who voiced concerns about the district’s mask mandate is calling for Jann-Michael Greenburg to immediately step down as board president. Amy Carney is a mother of six and running for a seat on the Scottsdale Governing Board in November 2022.
“I am calling for the immediate resignation of our board president Jann-Michael Greenburg. We cannot allow anyone in a leadership position to secretly compile personal documents and information on moms and dads who have dared speak out publicly or on social media about their grievances with the district,” Carney said.
Amanda Wray is another mom who was appalled to learn of the dossier.
“I was shocked at what I saw,” Wray told the Daily Independent. “There are 47 different people in there. I saw pictures of my children, other people’s children. This is cyberstalking.”
One might be tempted to dismiss the Scottsdale story as a fringe, one-of-a-kind set of circumstances. Except we’ve seen this type of behavior just recently, in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Back in March, The Daily Wire reported on a private, 624-member Facebook group calling themselves the Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County. The group allegedly included current and former teachers and elected officials and they compiled a “lengthy list of parents suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its teaching of controversial racial concepts — with a stated purpose in part to ‘infiltrate,’ use ‘hackers’ to silence parents’ communications, and ‘expose these people publicly.’”
Such extreme actions by those in authority in public education, whether in Arizona, Virginia or anywhere else, ought to raise a red flag with parents everywhere.
School board members, teachers and administrators serve their communities, not the other way around. Obviously, something is seriously out of kilter with many of the school boards around the country, and the 2021 elections, especially in Virginia, reflected the inevitable reaction of concerned parents who are increasingly pushing back after being told that they have no say in what the public schools teach their children.
Related:
Fighting for the Next Generation: School Board Elections, Parental Rights and ‘The Washington Post’
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