The public school solution
Parents and guardians around the country, are concerned about the public school system. While some can opt-out, it is not possible for everyone and even if it is financially feasible, children benefit from going to a school with their friends who live near them in the neighborhood. So, we must address the problems in the public school itself.
What are the problems? There’s the specific problems like mask mandates, vaccine mandates, critical race theory (CRT), and political gender identity. But I believe there is more of an overarching problem that is responsible for all of these and other issues we will face in the future. It has to do with the legal structure of the public school system and specifically the threat of lawsuits against the school district. Much of what a school board member and district office does is respond to lawsuits and their threat. I’m not talking about what are sometimes legitimate lawsuits where the school has actually done something wrong. I’m talking about the “shakedown” style lawsuits that predominate.
The basic strategy appears to be:
- Come up with a controversial topic (like CRT or political gender identity) that a special interest group supports.
- Build a curriculum for it that you make available for sale.
- Lobby and threaten lawsuits against school boards around the country if they don’t buy your curriculum.
To address this problem, we need a new legal structure for schools. The new structure that I am proposing is a pair of private LLCs with an associated non-profit foundation. You would have two LLCs, an operating LLC which operates the schools and a holding LLC which holds the real estate and other assets of the schools. Additionally, in some states like Wyoming there are specific laws that have added protections for cryptocurrency which may be beneficial so that the operating LLC can hold cryptocurrency with less risk. Just as with the public school system, this private operating LLC would be funded with property taxes (or whatever the current source of funding is). Any excess funds not used throughout the tax year would be donated to the non-profit foundation which is structured the same way that many public school foundations are setup today. This requirement would be included in the operating LLC’s operating agreement so that it is guaranteed to never distribute any profits to its members and it will never have tax consequences to the members. The members of both LLCs would be simply listed as “The parents and guardians of the students of the school district”. Thus the parents would having voting rights to appoint a superintendent. They would also have the right to vote on the trustees of the foundation. These would be provisions in the LLC’s operating agreement as well.
So, what does this structure do? It may sound very similar to the public school system and it is very similar with some important differences. The big difference is that the school district’s assets are now protected to a far greater degree from the frivolous lawsuits that we mentioned at the beginning of the article. When a frivolous lawsuit is filed, since the real estate is held in a separate LLC, not much is at risk. While a lawsuit could be filed against the holding LLC, the type of frivolous lawsuits we mentioned are more about how the school operates than the physical building. These protections become even stronger when the operating LLC holds cryptocurrency.
In discussions that I have had with school board members, my understanding is that a very significant amount of the time and effort that the district office has is dedicated to these lawsuits and the threat thereof so freeing up the school district to focus on the schools themselves would have a huge impact and likely lower the cost of schooling as well.
There is an additional problem that some of the “shakedown” that is occurring has actually been codified into the state laws that even apply to private schools. That can be addressed through common law. This is a topic for another article though.
So, in conclusion, we should privatize the school system using the LLC + Foundation model discussed and this would give back parents/guardians the rights to control the schools free of the coercion of these special interest groups that are currently destroying them.
Edit: The original version of the story had an error about charging orders and was corrected.
