School Demands $117K For Curriculum Of Teacher Who Cheered Kirk Death

After a high school teacher in Rhode Island posted a video celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk, a concerned mother requested information about the materials this teacher uses in his classroom. In response, school officials demanded she pay roughly $116,000 to find out.

Benjamin Fillo is a social studies teacher at Barrington High School came under fire for posting multiple videos on social media demeaning Kirk shortly after his assassination. In one video, he called Kirk a “piece of garbage” and ended the video by saying, “this is what happens…bye, Charlie.” In another video, Fillo reportedly asserts that “Charlie Kirk is not in heaven right now.”

The “saga” began when Nicole Solas discovered these videos, according to the Goldwater Institute, a public policy and litigation group involved in the case. She submitted a public records request to the Barrington Public Schools asking for Fillo’s curriculum materials and any email correspondence containing the word “Trump” between Sept. 1, 2024, and the date of her request. In a second request, she also asked for email records containing the word “Trump” dating back to Jan. 1, 2016. (According to a response from a lawyer at Henneous Carroll Lombardo LLC, the firm representing Barrington Public Schools, Solas’ request for Fillo’s email records since September 2024 yielded 789 emails.)

To provide all of the requested email and curriculum material, the school board claims that it would take 7,735.5 hours of labor, and cost $117,130.50, with the bulk — $116,030 — being for the curriculum. If Solas wanted the documents printed, that would cost an extra $6,692.55. 

In an interview with The Federalist, Solas said she wanted to obtain Fillo’s “curriculum materials” to investigate whether they contain “indoctrination, politically biased lessons, or any leftist ideological teaching.” She said the school should make Fillo’s teaching materials part of their larger investigation into his Charlie Kirk comments. However, the school does not seem to be doing this, “or else the school would have already had [Fillo’s curriculum] and given it to me for free,” she noted.

Solas’ lawyer from the Goldwater Institute’s pro-bono American Federation Network sent the school district a letter demanding a more reasonable fee, but as Solas told Fox News last week, “Quite frankly, it should be zero because these are curriculum materials that the taxpayer has already paid for.” 

The interim superintendent of Barrington Public Schools told Fox News that “Since the first request, recognizing the cost was high, we suggested to the requester that narrowing the scope (for example, to materials from 2020 onward, when the District adopted its current learning management system) would reduce the cost to roughly $5,500.”

But as one Barrington mother said, “Taxpayers have a right to this information that should be readily available, and the actions of BPS lead one to believe that there’s something to hide.” 

Revelations of Fillo’s online comments about Charlie Kirk led the school board to place him on administrative leave. However, parents have demanded more of the school board. As one parent said in front of the board at a Sept. 15 meeting, “Paid leave is a vacation.” Multiple parents and students called for Fillo’s immediate firing at the September meeting, but the school board’s response was to open an outside investigation while Fillo was placed on leave, as The New York Post reported. Notably, Fillo was serving as the co-president of a local teachers’ union chapter before the incident, but has been asked to step aside in the meantime.

Even if Fillo was the only teacher in the Barrington district who posted a video celebrating Kirk’s death, his political positions may not be an outlier among other teachers in the district. Solas said there were teachers and coaches who came to Fillo’s defense during the September meeting, including one who demanded that the school board apologize to Fillo for investigating his conduct. She also pointed to student allegations during the meeting that raised questions about Fillo’s potential political bias in the classroom. For example, in clear reference to Fillo, one student said that her “American Studies” teacher claimed “modern-day Republicans would support slavery” while teaching the Civil War.

“I think it’s important to make parents and taxpayers aware if this indoctrination is in the classroom materials because these are tax-funded materials,” she told The Federalist.

This is not Solas’ first encounter with a school that withholds important information about what goes on in the classroom.

Solas lives in a different school district, and her kids go to private school because National Education Association Rhode Island, a branch of the nation’s largest teachers’ union, sued her for requesting public records about political indoctrination in her own district. The litigation is still ongoing in that lawsuit.

Solas says that parents who are afraid of the kind of retaliation she has received ask her for help in exposing indoctrination in their schools. This is why parents in the Barrington district reached out to her requesting help exposing Fillo’s online behavior.

In 2021, she requested information from her daughter’s kindergarten in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. In response, the school board set an agenda item for a public meeting where they would discuss “filing litigation against Nicole Solas to challenge the filing of over 160 APRA requests.” Shortly after that, Solas was sued by the National Education Association.

The Federalist reached out to the interim superintendent of Barrington schools, Robert Mitchell, asking if the school plans to fully investigate the course content and teaching materials of Benjamin Fillo. The Federalist also asked how parents can be confident that an investigation is underway when Fillo’s course materials and email records are hidden from the public behind a $117K paywall.

In response, Sarah Dell of Advocacy Solutions who “support[s] communications for Barrington Public Schools” forwarded a statement by Mitchell. The five-paragraph statement claiming Barrington “fully complies with Rhode Island’s Access to Public Records Act” appeared to be the same one distributed to Fox News, and did not answer The Federalist’s specific questions about an investigation into Fillo’s teaching materials.

The Federalist was unable to reach Fillo for comment.

Bradley Haley is a George Washington Fellow at Hillsdale College, and the Founder of New Guard Press.