About Us
We are the parents of D.U. and A.U., who were made out to be safety threats by Blue Valley
“Blue Valley educators are doing their absolute best to serve your child, but you are making that impossible for them to do with your tormenting emails and false allegations about conspiracy theories and a ‘murder list hoax.’ No one has defamed D.U. Instead, you have repeatedly engaged in slanderous communications to personnel at Cedar Hills Elementary and Liberty View Elementary regarding Wolf Springs staff members. You are now asserting false accusations against Liberty View staff members. If this does not stop immediately, Blue Valley will be forced to seek any legal action available to the school district.”
Empty threats by Dr. Tonya Merrigan, Superintendent of Blue Valley Schools
Pro Se Litigation
We are pro se (self-representing) litigants trying to reveal the truth and clear our family’s name from Blue Valley’s false accusations. We have one ongoing lawsuit in in the federal court against Blue Valley and Kansas State Department of Education.
We represent ourselves in court instead of being represented by a lawyer for two reasons. First, we live in Johnson County in Kansas, where Blue Valley is almost like a “sacred” institution, like the church of a small town, and has a lot of “friends”. Therefore, challenging or criticizing Blue Valley can amount to “blasphemy” and elicit negative reactions from the community.
Second, Blue Valley is a very rich school district, ready to commit its vast resources to deterring those who it considers as threats to its reputation. This means costly legal battles, whose hourly attorney fees only millionaire parents can afford. Ordinary parents can seek justice only if their cases involve serious physical injury, sexual harassment, death, etc., which would make charging a contingency fee feasible for lawyers. Overall, our case does not warrant a contingency fee, and since we cannot afford to pay hourly attorney fees, the only way left for us to seek justice is by representing ourselves in court.
Besides the lawsuit in the federal court, we also have two related lawsuits in the county court. One of these cases is against Clifford Cohen, the so-called student rights lawyer who we retained when our younger son was falsely accused by Blue Valley of having a murder list. This lawyer is basically a “good friend” of Blue Valley, and his business is a scam meant for taking advantage of ordinary parents at their most vulnerable times. At the same time, his business serves the purpose of whitewashing Blue Valley’s violations of parent and student rights, as having a lawyer, on paper, indicates that the family has been allowed to pursue their case against Blue Valley.
Our other lawsuit in the county court is against a group of parent Karens who are also “good friends” of Blue Valley, who were misguided by them and who, as a result, targeted our family by spreading the murder list hoax. We actually have nothing against these parents and believe that they were, like us, the victims of Blue Valley. Our main motivation for filing the lawsuit was to prove that they were lied to by Blue Valley, and that the murder list threat they spread was a hoax. We hope that the proceedings will help them to accept these truths and to stop spreading Blue Valley’s lies.
Our Mission
Our short term objective may be revealing the truth about the murder list hoax and expose Blue Valley’s wrongdoings, but we also wish for a better education environment for families in the long run. Unfortunately, we are not dealing with a few rotten apples but with a rotten barrel. People such as Clifford Cohen and a few corrupt Blue Valley officials are merely the products of a bad system. We do not wish to go after the mosquitoes one by one, but to drain the swamp that gives rise to the mosquitoes in the first place.
We are educators ourselves, and we came from families that put great emphasis on education and on respect for authority. Sadly, our children’s experience in the education system has stripped us of the values that we were brought up with. The system is full of jaded and uncaring individuals, whose biggest concern is checking boxes and maintaining the facade of academic professionalism and rigor. They neither know nor want to know many of the children they are entrusted to. They care about an ordinary student as much as an assembly line worker cares about a widget. They just expect the students to be independent and stay in line. At school, they do the bare minimum for their students, just enough to get through the school day, and in the meantime, if they find a student annoying or if a student makes their job more difficult by not being independent enough, they retaliate.
We compare the school’s facade to that of a seemingly fancy restaurant. When you dine in a fancy restaurant, you enjoy the ambience and customer service. The menu looks very elegant and food presentation is excellent. Behind the scenes, however, the kitchen is dirty, the ingredients are rotten, there are rat droppings in the cellar, and the waiters spit in your food if they do not like you.
Administrators who do not teach are similarly jaded and uncaring. They fight fires instead of tackling and solving the underlying problems. When they fight fires, they aim at the flames rather than at the base of the fire. As a result, the fire reignites shortly after they put it out. They have become so short-term oriented and so inert that all they care about is cutting corners and sweeping things under the carpet, so that they can maintain their positions and authority in the short run.
Still, the worst thing about the system, what shocks us to this day, is educators flat out lying. They lie not only to students, but also to parents, and to the entire community. All of us have a natural desire to believe, trust, and respect those who hold a position of power. By lying, educators betray our trust and rob us of our faith in a better world for our children. Only after countless and constant lies we have been told over the years, we have come to accept the possibility that educators abuse their power and lie.