Sorting through all the negative messages can be exhausting. Even more so when a candidate and committee is purposely creating a misleading or downright dishonest message to try and sway your vote.

We can’t possibly keep up with all the false claims made on the Internet, and there are many wonderful resources available to understand larger national issues. You can find links to many of them on our Resources page.

Here, we’ll address Lowell School Board-specific messaging that is intentionally designed to mislead or misinform voters. We hope you find these quick examples helpful in understanding some of the charged claims being made.

Issue:
The website is down and Lowell is adding info for parents!

Posted on Facebook 11-5-2022

For the Record:
The web service was down for SCHEDULED maintenance and the Parent Media Resource section is over 12 months old.

This individual is so focused on ‘catching’ someone doing something that validates her imagination she can’t even investigate a web site being down before she blasts outrageous accusations across the far and wide.

Beware the sources of your information. Especially when the person feeding you the problem is also selling you the solution.

Let’s unpack this post:

  • The Parent Media Resources section on lowellschools.com has been there since 2021. The content of that section was created in September of 2021.

  • An audit of the file this info is sourced from confirms it has not been updated since the 9/21 posting.

  • There’s nothing new here - in fact its old and will be updated soon. How do we know this? We made the effort to ask.

  • The author of the post continues to fail at fact checking her assumptions - this is yet another example.

  • The author “has a feeling” the site will lock down the ‘porn’ and require passwords. Despite her incessant insistence otherwise her feelings are NOT facts.

    • If a parent has restricted access to authors, titles, or topics for THEIR child — they will not have access to login to Destiny or Sora as this is how digital books are restricted at a parent’s request.

    • If a parent has not put restrictions on THEIR child’s access, they will be able to login to their Destiny and Sora accounts with their district credentials to check out eBooks.

    • There is no restriction for the search of all titles in the school system. The entire library catalog is accessible and transparent.

    • Each school system curates their own libraries, a system software upgrade will not change any school’s library contents.

    • Titles in each collection change regularly. New books are constantly being purchased and old books are continuously being weeded out if they have not been checked out in numerous years. LAS works hard to maintain a current, diverse, well-rounded up-to-date library collection.

  • The author of this post wants you to share in her outrage - but which one will you pick?

    • She’s outraged that there is content she disagrees with.

    • She’s outraged that there might be passwords to restrict access to the content she disagrees with.

    • She’s outraged that book titles in the school libraries may have changed in the past few months.