August 20, 2020

Ms. Crissy Caceres, Head of School

BFS Board of Trustees

Dear Ms. Caceres and Board of Trustees:

My name is Carlos Ball. My children Ema (Class of 2019) and Sebastian (Class of 2020) graduated from BFS. Ema attended BFS for eleven years and Sebastian attended the school for twelve years.

I write to express my surprise that the Quaker school that I entrusted to educate my children has filed a petition with the NLRB to question the ability of a union to represent the school's employees. But even more fundamentally, I am appalled and saddened by the fact that the school is justifying such a misguided action by relying on changes in the law pushed by the Trump administration. As I am sure you know, the administration has repeatedly sought to grant religious organizations, including those that operate schools and hospitals, exemptions from otherwise applicable legal obligations not to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals. These efforts have been particularly devastating to transgender individuals as they confront systemic discrimination by employers, schools, and medical professionals.

As a law professor, I have been writing and advocating against such religious exemptions. It is crucially important that all organizations, whether religious or not, abide by the same neutral and generally applicable laws (such as antidiscrimination laws, health insurance mandates, and labor laws). Otherwise, we end up with a situation where religious schools and hospitals, for example, are carved out from crucial laws and regulations aimed at protecting individuals from discrimination and other harms.

The Trump administration, of course, sees it very differently. It has pushed hard for precisely the types of exemptions that progressives across the country have been fighting for years. And now, incredibly, BFS is trying to take advantage of the Trump rules to question the ability of its teachers and staff to form a union.

My understanding is that you are contending that communicating with faculty and staff directly, rather than through a union, is required by or consistent with Quaker values. I will leave it to your collective judgments and consciences whether that is in fact the case. But what I believe is completely and utterly inconsistent with Quaker ideals is to rely on Trump administration regulations to achieve that objective. Quakers, I would hope, should care not only about ends, but also about means.

I therefore urge you to withdraw the petition that you have filed with the NLRB.

Sincerely yours,

Carlos Ball

Parent of Ema Ball-Storrow (Class of 2019) and Sebastian Ball-Storrow (Class of 2020)