LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — The Clark County Education Association (CCEA) has filed an Anti-SLAPP Special Motion to dismiss CCSD’s lawsuit.
Cornell Law school defines a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) as a lawsuit filed to make critics spend all of their time and resources defending the SLAPP suits. Anti-SLAPP motions make it easier for defendants to have the case dismissed.
In court documents submitted in district court on Monday, Aug. 21, the CCEA said the Clark County School District (CCSD) “brought this lawsuit against Defendants for political rather than legal purposes…Because The District cannot show that it is likely to prevail on the merits of its claims, Defendants are entitled to an order of dismissal…”
CCSD quotes CCEA officials in its defense, using statements, tweets, and retweets by anonymous people, and email responses it singled out from among the 18,000 members of the teachers’ union.
Those statements were protected by the U.S. Constitution and by federal law, which leads CCEA to believe CCSD’s claim came from acts of speech, which is why they filed for an Anti-SLAPP Special Motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
The CCEA’s motion is attached below.
The Clark County Education Association released a statement regarding the motion filed which is below.
CCEA is committed to ensuring that CCSD’s efforts to stifle the first amendment rights of 18,000 educators will not succeed.
This lawsuit was filed by the District to chill the speech and punish protected activity by members and personnel of CCEA. What the District wants is a compliant teachers union, fractured and anxious, against which it can impose its will more easily, and this lawsuit, along with its spurious EMRB Petition, was part of a strategy to achieve that. The District, however, has grievously miscalculated.
Educators are more united than ever in solidarity and committed to our negotiation team’s
demands at the bargaining table, and CCEA is more than prepared to win the contract that
educators deserve.
– CCEA statement
