Concord-Carlisle Harassed Republican Students Violated Federal Law, 20 U.S.C. §1232h

By Amy Contrada
January 2001

A U.S. history teacher at Concord-Carlisle High School, Joseph Zellner, harassed Republican students in class last week in violation of federal law, 20 U.S.C. §1232h.

The school administrators did not express any concern over the incident.

The teacher orally surveyed the students about their political party affiliation; and then, to those not in agreement with his politics, he distributed a paper with ten inflammatory points arguing that this country is no different than the third world.

A parent has complained in writing to the principal. She said that if the charges are correct, the teacher should “be severely reprimanded and removed from his position of trust” at the high school. She said that his action “mocks Concord’s dedication to ‘tolerance.’”

Neither the principal nor the teacher has returned a call from Massachusetts News.

The federal law says, “No student shall be required, as part of any applicable program, to submit to a survey, analysis, or evaluation that reveals information concerning … political affiliations …” In addition, parents have the right to inspect “all instructional materials … or other supplementary material which will be used in connection with any survey, analysis, or evaluation…”

Since not all students in the class were given this handout, those who received it were clearly singled out by the teacher for humiliation. How many parents even knew this was a topic for discussion that day?

In his class of about twenty students, Zellner asked which of them were Republicans. About five students held up their hands. One student asked him why he was seeking such personal information. The questioning student and other self-identified Republicans were then singled out by Zellner to receive the following handout which had been widely distributed on the Internet.

“For Your Consideration
“An interesting alternative perspective on the U.S. presidential election.

“A Zimbabwe politician has been quoted as saying that children should study this year’s U.S. presidential election closely, because it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena. In that spirit, consider the recent proceedings from a slightly different perspective:

“1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation’s secret police (CIA).

“2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation’s past.

“3. Imagine that the self-declared winner’s ‘victory’ turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother.

“4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner’s opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

“5. Imagine that members of that nation’s most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner’s candidacy.

“6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner’s brother.

“7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner’s ‘lead’ was only 300 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines’ margin of error.

“8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.

“9. Imagine that the self-declared winner was himself the governor of a major province, which had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and which actually led the nation in executions.

“10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

“None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner’s will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.”