Two Ohio moms are suing the leaders of an elite private school in Columbus, claiming that they faced a coordinated campaign of character assassination and retaliation — including having their kids booted from the school — after they began fighting the leftward drift of the institution and raised questions about alleged financial wrongdoing.
The school, Columbus Academy, is accusing the moms of rehashing two-year-old “lies.”
The lawsuit, filed on June 12 in Franklin County, claims that Columbus Academy leaders conspired to intentionally inflict emotional distress on the mothers, Amy Gonzalez and Andrea Gross, through conduct that was “extreme and outrageous,” and that they violated Ohio law by misrepresenting the school as inclusive of all backgrounds and viewpoints when it is not.
The lawsuit also accuses the school’s leaders of committing “financial wrongdoing” to benefit themselves, by failing to properly disclose loans and tax-deferred bonuses to Head of School Melissa Soderberg, deceptively underreporting compensation to key leaders and staffers, failing to properly disclose payments to the board president’s family-owned construction business, and wasting nonprofit assets in a variety of ways.
The lawsuit claims that school leaders retaliated against Gonzalez and Gross and coordinated to destroy their reputations “to prevent any further inquiry into the financial wrongdoing of the Academy and personal benefit of the Defendants and other Academy personnel.”
Warner Mendenhall, the lawyer representing Gross and Gonzalez, told National Review that he’s “really offended” by the behavior of Columbus Academy’s leaders.
“They held themselves out as open to all views and robust debate. They also held themselves out as being very open to parent involvement and parent concern, and they simply were not,” Mendenhall said. “They are not open to any conservative views. They’re not open to any parents or children who supported Trump.”
“All of those conservative viewpoints are suppressed and attacked,” he said.
In a response to the lawsuit, Dan Williamson, a Columbus Academy spokesman, said in an email that Gonzalez and Gross “launched a national media attack against Columbus Academy two years ago,” and their lawsuit “has no basis in fact and no legal merit.” He noted that Gonzalez and Gross are both on the board of a private classical school opening in Columbus in the fall.
“Their talking points are old and tired,” Williamson told National Review. “Columbus Academy will withstand this assault as we did the last one and continue to stand for independence and excellence in the education of young scholars.”
The lawsuit is the latest flashpoint in the slow-rolling fight over allegations of political and cultural bias at the prestigious school, accusations of racial discrimination and financial mismanagement, and the rights of parents at a private institution. Both sides have accused the other of dishonesty, twisting facts, gaslighting, bullying, and committing online sabotage.
National Review first wrote about the case in 2021 after Columbus Academy leaders kicked Gonzalez’s and Gross’s kids out of the school.
Gonzalez and Gross said their first concerns about the school’s direction had to do with what they saw as a lack of resources for kids with learning disabilities. Gross, whose daughter has attention deficit disorder, said she questioned why the school didn’t have money for learning specialists, “but,” she told them, “you just doubled your diversity department in the same year.”
Gonzalez, whose daughter is Latina, had concerns about the increasing number of insular affinity groups that she saw popping up around the school.
They started to network with other parents, students, and alumni who shared similar concerns about left-wing bias at the school, where tuition can run over $30,000 per year.
At one point, Columbus Academy’s diversity director described the school as “110 years of white supremacy.” After social-justice riots erupted around the country in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the school sent out a “Justice in June” email, suggesting that members of the Columbus Academy community read about white privilege and the case for reparations, donate money to progressive groups including Black Lives Matter and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and advocate defunding the police department.
The school’s nine-page United Against Racism statement, released after Floyd’s death, announced a new focus on so-called anti-racism. Teachers were urged to tune into online lectures by anti-racist advocates, including Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo.
Parents also told Gonzalez and Gross stories about teachers refusing to engage with supporters of former president Donald Trump, claiming that there’s “only one side” to a political issue, and alleging that Republicans don’t like poor and homeless people, according to the lawsuit.
In response, Gonzalez and Gross formed a coalition of concerned parents, Pro CA, to air their concerns and to push back on what they saw as the leftward drift of the school.
They wrote an open letter to the board of trustees and requested to read it to the entire board. Board leaders denied the request, despite previously agreeing to meet with a group of black parents to discuss racism and discrimination at the school, Gross and Gonzalez said.
The women instead emailed the Pro CA letter to board members, and they participated in a Zoom call with four board members and Soderberg.
Gonzalez and Gross said that for the most part the board members refused to answer their questions and ignored their concerns.
Williamson, the Columbus Academy spokesman, previously told National Review that the school did respond to the Pro CA group’s concerns, and the board committed to ensuring that diverse opinions would be welcome in the classrooms. But, he added at the time, “there is a difference between not listening, and listening and not fully agreeing.”
According to the lawsuit, someone – likely Soderberg – forwarded excerpts of the group’s letter to members of the Columbus Academy community. “The excerpts were chosen and arranged in such a way as to paint the Parent Plaintiffs in a negative light as racists and subject them to scrutiny, intimidation, harassment, and bulling,” the lawsuit states.
“Academy faculty and administration appropriated inflammatory rhetoric and launched a coordinated effort to discredit Plaintiffs by labeling them as ‘anti-Black’ and ‘bat-shit crazy Republicans,” the lawsuit states, adding that during a meeting “Ms. Soderberg labeled the Parent Plaintiffs as against the Academy and created an aggressive us-and-them relationship between Plaintiffs and Academy administration and faculty.”
At one point, Gonzalez and Gross appeared on a conservative podcast where the hosts — former game-show host Chuck Woolery and businessman Mark Young — described the school as a “cult,” the school leaders as “lunatics,” and the student body as “Hitler Youth.” The hosts threw out ideas about how to “cripple [the school] financially.”
“How do you hurt them?” Woolery asked on the podcast, where Gonzalez and Gross appeared at least three times. “We’re all about bringing pain to people that deserve it,” Young said.
School leaders worried that the podcast comments could lead to physical threats. The school’s head of security filed a police report, claiming that the comments constituted “an indirect threat against the Academy and its personnel,” the lawsuit states. School leaders also claimed to have alerted the FBI, according to the lawsuit.
“The only irony here is, the people the FBI should be investigating are not these parents, which the school tried to make happen. It’s the school itself,” Mendenhall said.
Gonzalez’s and Gross’s children were eventually kicked out of the academy. School leaders said it was because Gonzalez and Gross had violated their enrollment contract by painting the academy in a bad light on that podcast and in videos, not because they had concerns about their kids’ education or the school’s direction.
Gonzalez and Gross say they believe they were targeted by school leaders in part because of the alleged financial wrongdoing they had uncovered.
According to the lawsuit, an accountant and research analyst working with the women conducted a forensic accounting review of the school’s public tax forms and found several examples of financial mismanagement, including $100,000 and $250,000 loans to Soderberg that were paid back through annual bonus payments, and described in a report as “a disguised, tax-deferred, five-year guaranteed bonus scheme for Ms. Soderberg’s personal gain.”
The audit also claimed to have to have found that academy leaders “consistently and deliberately” underreported the compensation of key employees and executives, failed to properly disclose $37.8 million in no-bid construction projects awarded to the board president’s family-owned firm, and wasted nonprofit assets through “gross financial management incompetence.”
Mendenhall said his team is alerting the IRS to the alleged financial mismanagement.
“I honestly do believe in my heart that the trying to burn us down and the trying to paint a picture of us as being violent, racist, Nazi, bat-shit crazy is because they did not want anyone to dig deeper into what was really going on,” Gross said.
Mendenhall said they expect to uncover more evidence of that during the discovery process.
Getting kicked out of the only school they’d ever known was devastating to Gonzalez’s and Gross’s children, who lost friends, the women said. “The way that you would hurt Amy and I the most is you would hurt our kids, and that’s exactly what they did,” Gross said.
Gonzalez and Gross said they homeschooled their kids the year after they were kicked out of Columbus Academy. Gross’s kids attended a different school last year, and Gonzalez’s daughter attended an online program. Gonzalez and Gross are both on the board of the new Columbus Classical Academy, a private school slated to open this fall.
Mendenhall said the Gonzalez and Gross were “defrauded,” because Columbus Academy misrepresented itself. “We would like to recover that money,” he said.
“We need these schools to be on notice that they need to be open to people of all beliefs, and all ideologies, and all races, especially schools that hold themselves out as open do diverse points of view,” he said. “Let’s hold them to their word. That’s all we’re about.”
“We just wanted to know what we were buying,” Gonzalez said.
This is the second lawsuit Gonzalez and Gross have filed against the school. The lawsuit they filed last year was voluntarily dismissed and narrowed, Mendenhall said.
Gross said that their goal with the lawsuit is to, “honestly, just save” Columbus Academy.
“We want the truth to come out,” she said. “We want people to be held accountable for their actions. And we have always loved that school.