The Mars Area School District and two other area districts have filed a lawsuit asking Commonwealth Court to void education guidelines that include "culturally relevant and sustaining education (CRSE)."

The Penn Crest School District in Crawford County and Laurel School District in Lawrence County also are plaintiffs in the suit filed Monday against Gov. Josh Shapiro and acting Secretary of Education Khalid Mumin who are implementing guidelines that were created by former Gov. Tom Wolf in November 2022 before he left his second term in office.

All school districts are required to implement the guidelines by the beginning of the 2023-24 school year. Subsidies the districts receive from the state will be withheld if they don't comply, according to the suit.

The plaintiffs' primary objection is that academic standards and curriculum mandated in CRSE were put in place as guidelines to circumvent a formal review required by the Regulatory Review Act of 1982, according to the suit filed by Butler attorney Tom Breth.

"First and most important, the Department of Education and secretary of education don't have the legal authority to issue regulations under the guise of guidance," Breth said Tuesday.

He said state law delegates the authority to establish curriculum to school boards and district superintendents, not the secretary of education.

"This guidance is an effort to control the curriculum within those school districts," Breth said.

According to the suit, the state School Code contains references to CRSE, but does not contain regulations for implementation and does not authorize Shapiro or Mumin to issue regulations in the form of guidance.

The suit challenges several CRSE guidelines as unconstitutionally vague and lacking any means of objective measurement.

One of those guidelines, according to the suit, requires teachers to “engage in critical and difficult conversations with others to deepen their awareness of their own conscious/unconscious biases, stereotypes, and prejudices; disrupt harmful institutional practices, policies, and norms by advocating and engaging in efforts to rewrite policies, change practices, and raise awareness.”

According to the suit, the guidelines also require teachers to “design learning experiences and spaces for learners to identify and question economic, political, and social power structures in the school, community, nation, and world; understand and honor the ways in which culture influences verbal and nonverbal communication; believe that all learners have a choice and a right to practice the language of their culture; and, believe and acknowledge that microaggressions are real and take steps to educate themselves about the subtle and obvious ways in which they are used to harm and invalidate the existence of others.”

The guidelines define microaggressions as a “comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalized group (such as a racial minority),” but the term is not recognized or defined in state law, according to the suit.

The suit questions the requirement for teachers to “disrupt harmful institutional practices, policies, and norms by advocating and engaging in efforts to rewrite policies, change practices, and raise awareness” by saying it calls for teachers to disrupt the practices of the district that employs them, and doesn't specify which institutional practices, policies and norms they are required or permitted to disrupt.