KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. — Chad Williams is taking the fight against COVID-era tyranny to his kids’ school district in southeastern Pennsylvania.
“If I don’t fight this battle, nobody else is going to,” Williams told The Post. “What happened was wrong.”
A business lawyer and father of four, Williams began to question the Unionville-Chadds Fords School District’s legal authority to impose restrictions such as mask mandates and forced remote instruction during the pandemic in 2020.
At the time, his two daughters — one in high school, the other a rising middle schooler — were struggling mightily with disruptions to their schooling.
Like so many other parents, Williams had a simple question for his children’s school officials in the Philadelphia suburbs: Why push policies that clearly do damage to our children?
“You’re hurting my kids. I don’t think you have the legal authority to enforce the policies you’re enforcing,” Williams said of his initial communications with school officials. “I want to know where your authority comes from, and why you’re refusing to report the harm [done] to my kids and to other kids.
As a volunteer football coach in the district, Williams is a mandated reporter and therefore compelled to raise his concerns for the community’s children.
Four years later, Williams is fighting for answers.
“This is the only case in the country that I am aware of that is a legal challenge based on unlawful conduct by school officials during the pandemic that resulted in harm to children,” Williams said.
Williams said the Pennsylvania Department of Education finally confirmed in a letter he received Friday that on the merits of his Educator Misconduct Complaint, it will investigate UCFSD Superintendent John Sanville for misconduct and potential violations of the law.
The state must now decide if the district’s policies and subsequent actions were “legally sufficient for professional discipline” as established by a January Pennsylvania Supreme Court case, Williams said.
It’s a fight that has not been easy.
At UCFSD board meetings throughout 2020 and 2021, Williams was the voice of parents who could only watch as elected officials unanimously doubled down on their mask mandates.
Though he filed multiple complaints, Williams said the district continued to ignore his calls for an investigation into Sanville for pushing the policies — especially after a December 2021 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling found the state’s acting health secretary had exceeded her authority by issuing school mask mandates.
“After that Supreme Court opinion saying they didn’t have the authority to do this, they still kept enforcing policy from December [2021] until March [2022],” Williams said.
Williams would not relent in his pursuit of justice, as he decided to enlist Republican state Sen. Scott Martin to his cause in 2022.
When Martin wrote to the district, the district — represented by Philadelphia law firm Fox Rothschild — accused Williams of forging the letter and threatened to sue.
“I’d given them multiple opportunities to correct my understanding of the facts,” Williams said “and they never responded.”
“The intent of it was clear: to try and bully me into dropping this,” Williams added. “They threatened to come after my house. They said ‘notify all insurers’ — they were gonna come after me.”
Fox Rothschild also represents the neighboring Great Valley School District, which has been engulfed by a social-media scandal this summer.
Pennsylvania congressional candidate Neil Young — also a teacher who was victimized by that scandal — told The Post he believes Great Valley’s solicitors advised the district to brush off concerns of teachers being harassed and falsely impersonated online by middle-school students.