Newberg Public Schools District Protects Counselors Who Made Controversial TikTok Videos

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On March 10th, I published the news article, Newberg Middle School Counselors Flip Off Concerned Parents In Tik Tok Video. In this story I provided evidence that Mountain View Middle School counselors Annie Bynum and Erin Dobias in Newberg, Oregon spend their work hours making Tik Tok videos, one of which featured the pair performing a vulgar gesture while standing in front of a pride flag decorating a classroom wall.

My article was cited by numerous publications and the article has been read over 24,000 times. The Advocate has received many inquiries from concerned parties requesting emails about what consequences Bynum and Dobias have faced and if there are any other updates.

I have possessed additional information to report about this story for several weeks, but I had been waiting for confirmation of a few facts; confirmation which ideally would have been provided by the fulfillment of public records requests which I submitted to the Newberg public schools district. I made my first request of the district on March 21st, followed by several other requests. To date the Newberg schools district has fulfilled none of these requests, with differing reasons provided. While one of the requests was outright rejected, the district appears to be attempting to play a game of semantics with my other requests, claiming they cannot be fulfilled because the “keywords” are returning too many results in their search of district emails. The problem with this delay tactic is that my requests are very specific and the district employees responsible for fulfilling the requests (mainly, Shanna Andres, whose position at the district is Assistant to the Superintendent) know this.

So, instead of merely writing an update about the Newberg school counselors who created the controversial TikTok videos and what has transpired since, I will now also show how the Newberg public school district is obstructing the timely fulfilment of public records requests in order to protect these counselors from the consequences of their poor decision making.

School Counselor Erin Dobias Chaperoned Students on a School Organized Trip to Ecuador While “Suspended”

As mentioned in my original article, on March 14th, Newberg Public Schools Communication Coordinator Gregg Koskela (who I should note, is also a member of Newberg Equity in Education, the Indivisible aligned social activist group this paper has been exposing) sent the following email notice to parents concerning this matter,

As it turns out, this email was an outrageous lie.

Contrary to what Koskela wrote to parents, Erin Dobias continued to perform work for the Newberg school district and interact with students in her capacity as an employee of the district, working as a chaperone. This is because Erin Dobias went on a school organized trip to Ecuador with students the very next week. I confirmed this through a review of photographs of her on the trip with students and through email correspondence with interim Superintendent Dave Novonty.

For proof, you may read my email correspondence for yourself,

As can be read in the emails, Novotny acknowledged two important things;

1. Erin Dobias did in fact go on the trip to Ecuador with students as a chaperone during the time she was supposed to be suspended.
2. Interim Superintendent Novotny had been misinformed that the trip was not associated with the school, when in fact it was a school organized event.

As I pointed out in my emails to Novotny, it is beyond contestation that the trip was school organized, because these trips are organized by Dobias herself using her official school email address and the trips are advertised on a school district website page, such as this one.

You should know that if you click on the above link, you’ll be presented with a locked page. As mentioned before, I believe the Newberg public school district is attempting to hide evidence as a means of trying to protect Dobias. However, you can look at my screenshot of the page prior to its removal,

This page in question mentions a trip to Costa Rica that was intended to take place during 2020, but due to the covid-19 pandemic the trip was changed to instead visit Ecuador this year. Dobias went on the trip with students just days after her supposed “suspension” after the release of my news story featuring her controversial Tik Tok videos.

Furthermore, Dobias is set to chaperone students to Washington DC in June on yet another school organized trip.

Newberg Public School District Protects Dobias and Bynum by Refusing Public Records Requests

As a way to ascertain a few facts, I made several public records requests of the Newberg public school district. I will discuss each one in detail and why the district has not fulfilled them.

Request for Security Video Footage

Shortly after the publishing of my article, Progressive Yamhill / Newberg Equity in Education members went into crisis mode on social media, making a variety of claims in an effort to make excuses for the behavior of Dobias and Byum. One of the most common excuses is that the videos were produced “after work hours”. However, it is clear that some of the videos were produced during school hours, because there is a clock in the background, such as this video.

Regardless, I made a public records request of the school district to confirm whether the videos were produced during school operation hours or not. This request was for the security footage of the locations where the videos were made, on the dates and times I believed the videos to have been made based on the Tik Tok channel history.

This request was denied. The reason? The District claimed that security footage was part of employee personnel records and therefore could not be released.

This is a quite ridiculous assertion, because security footage is not something that goes into someone’s personnel records. And I pointed this out.

As I got no further reply from the School district, I filed a complaint against the district with the Yamhill County District Attorney office.

Request for Emails Related to the School Trips

In an effort to provide more evidence that the trip Erin Dobias chaperoned was indeed a trip she planned and organized in her capacity as a representative of the school district, on March 28th I filed a public records requests on her emails, as well as those of other district employees, related to the school trips.

Although Novotny stated that the request would be fulfilled, at present the requests have gone unfulfilled. Mainly because Shanna Andres is playing a game of semantics with my requests.

As you can see, weeks go by with no communication from Andres, and she uses every possible way she can to obstruct and delay the release of the requested emails.

It took a month just to get a time and cost estimate for the public records request, and then several days later instead of fulfilling the request, yet another delay tactic was used instead.

Despite her claim that because many emails appear in the requests that she cannot fulfill the requests, Andres is perfectly aware that I am looking for specific emails related to the trips which are from or to specific employees involved in the organizing of these trips. Public records requests are not fulfilled by a computer; they are fulfilled by a person who operates a computer. Andres is just as capable of filtering information as I am, to provide the emails that are relevant to my search. Instead I believe she is intentionally looking for ways to prevent the release of damaging emails that would show that despite the district claiming she was suspended, Dobias went on a school organized vacation with students while under investigation for her controversial Tik Tok channel videos.

I am no stranger to how to write in legalese and draft discovery requests; I have done so several times in the past, without ever experiencing the kind of delays and obstructions that Andres has demonstrated in these emails.

However, because Andres is the assistant to the superintendent, and he is CCed on the emails Andres has sent, that means Novotny has signed off on these responses to my requests. Consequently I hold him accountable for these delay tactics, too.

It is also obvious that Novotny knew exactly what emails I am seeking, as he stated the request would be fulfilled. Yet it has not been fulfilled and I believe it is intentionally because the District has decided to protect the School counselors instead of serving the best interests of parents and students, who deserve to know the truth about whether Dobias went on school organized trips despite having been told she was suspended. Releasing the emails to me, knowing that I will publish them, would mean the District would have to admit it has lied to parents about how it handles these kinds of violations of the rules when employees such as teachers and school counselors break them.

Consequently, I have filed yet another complaint against the Newberg school district with the Yamhill County District Attorney’s office for failing to fulfill the requests in a timely fashion with obvious intention to obstruct the release of these emails that would reveal uncomfortable truths.

This is just a small sampling of the kind of shenanigans my investigations have shown have become routine practices in the Newberg public schools district. It is clear that the infiltration of the district by Indivisible activists has resulted in both an entrenched culture of anti-professionalism and no accountability for employees who violate district policies when these violations are deemed to be part of Indivisible aligned activism. This is no doubt why Erin Dobias and Annie Bynum felt they were entitled to spend their work hours making Tik Tok videos, flipping the bird to anyone who thinks that the gay pride flag and other political symbols shouldn’t be hanging in our classrooms. They obviously had no fear of any consequences.

Sources Say the “Tik Tok Counselors” Have Not Been Punished

I have been informed by sources in the know that Novonty has not punished Erin Dobias nor Annie Bynum, nor Vicki Klein (who also featured in videos on the channel) because the teachers’ union threatened to file a lawsuit, claiming that the free speech rights of the employees would be violated if they are penalized for their behavior. According to the source, Novotny has claimed he cannot penalize them because then he would be in violation of his agreement with the district to not do anything unlawful, loosely interpreting it to mean he can’t do something that could result in a lawsuit.

By contrast, Novotny did fire Nutrition Services Manager and long-time employee Shelly Meyes a few weeks ago for having an expired food handler’s card and for being “insubordinate” for reporting her superiors for breaking school security policies by leaving exit doors open (which could mean intruders could easily get into the school building).

In the absence of the Newberg public school district releasing additional information to the public, this is the most reliable information I presently know about the matter.

So it appears that in Dave Novotny’s viewpoint of how to run a school district, if you tell parents to go fuck themselves if they don’t agree with your fringe political views then you get to be rewarded with school organized trips to other countries and students will be left in your unsupervised care for a week, but if you have an expired food handler’s card and are concerned about student’s safety, then you’ll be quickly shown the door.

There is another difference between them though; the counselors are radical extremist liberals who are aligned with Indivisible agenda and Shelly Meyes is a conservative who is not. And that is in my opinion the #1 reason why she was fired and the counselors who made the Tik Tok videos were not.

Is this fair? Of course it is not.

Unfortunately, life is not always fair. Nothing is ever fair when bad people obtain positions of power and use their privilege to serve an ideological agenda that is far removed from the principles of genuine virtues.

These people have nothing of value to teach the next generation of Americans and they are unworthy of the title of ‘teacher’. These people are disinterested in our democratic process, and seek to disrupt it using our public education system, and any other role they obtain in a similar institution. They indoctrinate children into insane, anti-American ideologies like Critical race theory, they exploit their positions to plaster public buildings with fringe political ideological symbols like black power fists and pride flags, and they openly mock parents in Tik Tok videos with no fear of repercussions because they know their “ally-accomplices” will protect them by using their own positions in these institutions.

This is the state of public education in America in the year 2022. It’s not just Newberg; our school district is just an example of what is going on all over the United States, wherever Indivisible agents have taken root and pushed their activism into our schools. Indivisible has over 3,000 chapters across the United States, operating in most every well populated city in our country. As I have mentioned in prior articles, you can download my list of their chapters in a spreadsheet I have created of them, pulled from the official Indivisible.org database.

I will continue to report on the activities of the Indivisible agents who have infiltrated the schools and local governments in Yamhill County, Oregon, but it is you, the reader of these articles, that must take action if these fringe extremists are to be removed from power. If the Newberg Schools Saga upsets you, then get involved in your own local communities. Run for elections, become an educator, get involved in fraternities and rotaries and other civil service organizations. Stop allowing Indivisible agents to bully people into silence using positions in these groups; take the groups back away from them.

The sane majority, those who still believe in traditional American values, need to restore excellence and common sense to our local communities if our nation is going to endure, and that cannot be done if the majority of people merely complain about how much they dislike the activities of Indivisible and other fringe extremist groups, and do nothing else but complain.

America will not continue to be the greatest country in the world if great people do not step forward and take back control over local institutions from the fringe lunatic losers that have taken roles in schools, city councils, congress, senates, and so on. The time for everyone to get involved in something is now.

Stay tuned for future articles from the Yamhill Advocate. There is more reporting to come.

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