Judge Christopher Barry-Smith of Middlesex Superior Court has dismissed a class-action lawsuit filed by Newton parents over last year’s Newton teachers’ strike.

“No Massachusetts common law doctrine recognizes a third party’s right to recover damages allegedly incurred due to a public employee strike,” he wrote in his decision.

Barry-Smith previously dismissed an attempt by parents to become parties to a suit filed by the city against the teachers’ union. In Massachusetts, it is illegal for public employees to go on strike, but the only parties who have standing to sue over public employee strikes are their employers. This is why Barry-Smith did not allow the parents to become parties to the previous suit, and why he dismissed this lawsuit.

“The interest of parents and students necessarily must be represented by their elected and appointed officials in collective bargaining,” he wrote.

He cited previous educational union-related lawsuits that said allowing parents to be directly part of the collective bargaining process would introduce “inherent disruption.” In Massachusetts, the legislature established the Commonwealth Employee Relations Board to manage disputes between towns and employees, and all disputes must go through the board to act as a neutral party.

Three Newton Public Schools parents, Lital Asher-Dotan, Dmitriy Sokolovskiy, and Ronit Inbar, filed the lawsuit against the head of the Newton Teachers Association Michael Zilles, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the National Education Association, and the United Auto Workers.

This last union may seem like an odd inclusion, except that UAW president Shawn Fain expressed his support for the strike.

The parents argued that the strike caused both emotional and financial harm to Newton families, who deserve to be compensated for damages caused. They cited a 1987 court case wherein Boston families were awarded damages after a school bus driver strike. But Barry-Smith said those fines were because of the city’s contempt for a previous order, not because of the strike itself. The NTA noted in their response that the city is the entity that has an obligation to provide an education, not the teachers’ association.

The plaintiffs also called for rescission of the new contract, saying that “the unions should not keep the gains achieved by their illegal pressure tactics.” The NTA response to the lawsuit said returning to the bargaining table would be “unnecessarily wasting money, time, and resources in a district that already experiences budget problems.”

The lead plaintiff, Lital Asher-Dotan, hosts a podcast with her husband, Diti Dotan, who called Judge Barry-Smith and others communists.

“I think the governor and her peons don’t want this to be precedent,” Dotan said on the podcast. “What they want to do is legalize strikes, because they are communists. I don’t know when in the US communism stopped being a bad word. Communism is toxic. It’s not about money—it’s about power. It’s the desire to be able to strike. The desire of the union is not to get more money, it’s to be able to delete meritocracy. In an organization like a tech company, nobody wants a union. If I want, I can pay an employee ten times more than another employee, because he’s ten times more worthy. In a union in a communist country, and this is the communist rhetorics [sic] they’re using about proletarian and the right to employ, it means I have a hundred cogs and they’re all identical. Not the teacher who’s getting much better MCAS classes will get higher pay, but the teacher with more seniority, and by the fact that he’s there.”

Dotan is from Israel, a country where teachers are legally allowed to strike and, in fact, did so earlier this year.