Rhode Island school district outsourced intimidation of activist mom to teachers unions: lawsuit

Three years after Nicole Solas asked her Rhode Island school district for its curriculum and teaching materials related to critical race theory and gender identity before sending her daughter to kindergarten, the stay-at-home mother compelled South Kingston to turn over those records for free — not the $74,000 it demanded — and pay her attorney's fees and a civil fine.

Now she's going after the school district and former board members for "working hand in glove" with state and local teachers unions to sue Solas under the theory that records she sought would reveal teachers' private discussions, names and personally identifiable information.

Her attorneys in the federal First and Fourteenth Amendments lawsuit against South Kingston, School Committee members Sarah Markey and Emily Cummiskey include Republican super-lawyer Harmeet Dhillon's firm, which recently refiled a lawsuit against California's gender self-identification prison policies, and Rhode Island culture-war litigator Greg Piccirilli. 

Funded by the Center for American Liberty, the suit alleges they "acted in concert … in the names of" the National Education Association's Rhode Island and South Kingston affiliates to sue Solas in state court as retaliation for her "speech, political activities and related activism."

The suit also argues their demands for a permanent injunction, damages and attorney's fees against Solas "would chill a person of ordinary firmness from continuing to engage in these constitutionally protected activities."

Even if their actions had a "rational basis" and were not "malicious, irrational, or plainly arbitrary," they were "a pretext for an impermissible motive" — abusing the law to launch a viewpoint-based "public campaign of personal vilification" against Solas, the suit says.

They engaged in "civil conspiracy" through a "meeting of the minds" among the National Education Association Rhode Island, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Markey, Cummiskey and the district to violate the constitutional rights of those challenging their "political and cultural agenda" in schools and hide it from parents, the suit says.

3 years ago the teachers union sued me to harass me. South Kingstown School District was behind it the whole time.

Now I'm suing SKSD, the Town, & individuals, in a federal Section 1983 claim for conspiracy to deprive me of my civil rights.

Sue me harder, teachers union. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/UyQgKKb1rI

— Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union (@Nicoletta0602) August 5, 2024

Cornell law professor William Jacobson said at the time the teachers union suit "smells collusive" because "South Kingstown doesn't want to produce records and the union is helping them out" after the district backed down from its own proposal to sue Solas to stop her flood of  Access to Public Records Act requests.

Her interest was piqued when an elementary school principal told Solas that teachers don't refer to students as "boys" and "girls" and that a kindergarten teacher brought up gender identity in a lesson about "what could have been done differently on the first Thanksgiving," the suit says.

It was a School Committee member who told Solas to file APRA requests after she was ignored and stonewalled by officials, the suit says. One of the record categories she sought was "teacher discipline and performance."

Also a lawyer, Solas has fought to expose information including the identities of adult advisers to LGBTQ school clubs. The district argued gender identity is "medical" to keep private that information. 

She's in a long-running beef with state Attorney General Peter Neronha, who on his highly opinionated X account has dared her and other critics to sue him for muting them. Their bad blood is mentioned in the new suit.

Solas told Just the News she has a hearing Aug. 14 in her Open Meetings Act lawsuit against the school board, where she'll seek summary judgment, for not letting her into its BIPOC Advisory Committee meetings, where district policies on black, indigenous and people of color are discussed.

Markey, now a staffer at the Colorado Education Association, and Cummiskey, a nursing professor at the Community College of Rhode Island, did not respond to queries Thursday, and Superintendent Mike Podraza's office did not respond Friday. The docket does not yet list attorneys for the defendants.

The school district's "dominant agenda" comes from the teachers unions, the suit alleges, noting the state ethics board let Markey stay on the School Committee despite her full-time work for NEARI as long as she recused herself in connection with "union-related" issues. The School Committee's own attorney previously said Markey should resign.

Solas enjoyed "technical cooperation" with the district on APRA requests but exchanged "increasingly terse" emails with School Committee members through May 2021, later learning that then-Superintendent Linda Savastano emailed the unions to "alert" them that Solas' requests threatened the "equity and an antiracist culture," the suit says, quoting the superintendent.

Savastano used coded language to tell teachers to talk to union leadership about the APRA requests and "hint[ed]" to the School Committee that it should "slow-walk and, presumably, provide less revealing responses" to requests from Solas, the suit alleges.

The district gave her a "patently false response" when she asked for records on who calculates charges for APRA requests and jacked the fee demand from about $80 for one committee members' emails to $2,600 for another's.

In May and June 2021, the School Committee discussed suing Solas to stop her requests and  Chair Cummiskey publicly and falsely called her a tool of a "national racist group" — Parents Defending Education, the suit says. Rhode Island School Superintendents Association lobbyist Timothy Ryan also alleged PDE was responsible for "bombarding" the district.

Committee members and NEARI, NEASK and RISSA officials all used the "same intemperate and scandalous language" to talk about her, the suit says.

Ryan told his colleagues the state ACLU was "open" to changing APRA to stop Solas, but the civil liberties group then publicly contradicted him and said "suing a resident for this activity is not an appropriate response."

Markey appeared to play a behind-the-scenes role in stopping Solas, having co-founded a bookstore that organized union activists to attend the School Committee's June 2 meeting on Solas and APRA, yet didn't herself attend it for what she called "health issues." 

The suit speculates Markey skipped the meeting, resigned the same day and deleted a tweet against Solas to "give the appearance of 'distance' between NEARI and the School Committee" before the unions took the baton from the district and sued Solas. 

While the board ultimately approved mediation rather than litigation — later falsely claiming Solas rejected mediation — "the district’s union-inspired campaign" ramped up, according to the suit, with "teachers, residents, and parents ... using coded language lifted from teacher union rhetoric" to complain to the town council about Solas.

Cummiskey resigned a day after an NEASK Zoom meeting about Solas attended by 250 teachers, claiming an "unnamed public relations firm" had prepared what Solas calls "defamatory statements against me." (Solas told Just the News she sent an APRA request about the firm, Advocacy Solutions.)

She believes a School Committee executive session July 20, formally identified as related to NEASK, APRA and Open Meetings Act litigation, was actually about litigation against Solas "by their proxies," which the unions filed two weeks later. They named the district and School Committee as defendants to mask the "collusion," the suit speculates.

The unions convinced other state officials to intimidate Solas, including a state senator who claimed a year later she got Solas banned from Twitter, now X, and other lawmakers who "participated in an online smear campaign" against Solas for her local event on gender ideology in school, the suit says. 

Solas later accused its host, a public library, of charging a punitive security fee without any credible evidence of a threat against the event — again, citing APRA records.