These Parents Successfully Pressured Their School Board To Ditch Divisive Equity Training
About two weeks ago, I covered a proposed “Equity Training” contracted for the steep price of $37k by Douglas County School District in Colorado. The proposed training, provided by a consulting firm called The Gemini Group, was to be completed via zoom, available for staff and community members. It has been confirmed this week that the training was abruptly canceled late on the evening of March 25th as the result of parent backlash.
This comes as welcome news to thousands of parents across the country who have been fighting the same battle against Critical Race Theory in their home districts.
This success is particularly notable given the apparent disconnect between the values espoused by the parents in the district and those running the DCSD schools.
Correspondence between Douglas County Superintendent Corey Wise and The Gemini Group, submitted by a parent to The Daily Wire, are illustrative of how parents are perceived by school leaders and the pricey consulting firms they contract to indoctrinate their staff and students.
In response to the news of cancelation, The Gemini Group released an official statement, reporting that they “watched the school board meeting” (during which multiple impassioned parents appealed to the teachings of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.,) “and were disgusted and appalled at the level of misinformation and conscious misunderstanding” demonstrated by parents.
In their conclusion, after referring to Andrew Jackson as a “genocidal maniac” in the preceding paragraph, The Gemini Group accused “White parents” of “demanding that we not talk about race,” in a “willful attempt to maintain the status quo.”
In response to The Gemini Group’s official statement, Superintendent Wise responded that, “sadly,” DCSD parents “just aren’t ready for this work … at this time.” At no point in his response did Corey come to the defense of DCSD parents’ values or validate the merit of their concerns.
Regardless of differences in views, parental pressure was sufficient to convince Superintendent Wise to cancel the training, a decision which was explicitly attributed to his leadership in subsequent emails.
For parents fighting CRT in other states, success in Douglas County may be replicable in other purple districts. Located just outside of deep blue Denver, Douglas leans conservative, but only by a modest margin. In 2020, voters in Douglas County voted 52.4% for Trump, compared to 45.2% for Joe Biden. However, as copious reporting now suggests, opposition to Critical Race Theory may prove to be a uniting issue among conservatives and moderate liberals.
Together, conservatives, along with an increasing portion of liberal Americans, recognize what Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, contemporary and close advisor to Dr Martin Luther King Jr., recognized in a 2015 essay. Walker wrote:
“Today, too many ‘remedies’ — such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable post-Marxist/postmodernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on a spiritual or one-to-one human level — are taking us in the wrong direction: separating even elementary school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing differences instead of similarities.
“The answer is to go deeper than race, deeper than wealth, deeper than ethnic identity, deeper than gender. To teach ourselves to comprehend each person, not as a symbol of a group, but as a unique and special individual within a common context of shared humanity. To go to that fundamental place where we are all simply mortal creatures, seeking to create order, beauty, family, and connection to the world that — on its own — seems to bend too often towards randomness and entropy.”
Portions of the parent testimony that led the school board to reconsider can be heard here. An additional full length speech can be heard here.
Is your school district implementing divisive “Equity Trainings”? We want to tell your story. Contact me at [email protected] or on IG @georgiamaehowe.
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