By BCN Senior Editor
Parents Defending Education
Administrators at Wellesley Public Schools (WPS) in Massachusetts thought it would be a good idea to create “affinity groups” for black, Hispanic, and Asian students and hold school-sponsored and organized group sessions only they could attend under the guise of “racial equity.”Americans made sacrifices to end government-mandated
racial segregation. Some of these freedom fighters lost their lives. Young
people today might not be as aware of this as they should be. If you are
attending a government school, the school may not sponsor any event for
students of a certain racial group and bar students from a different racial
group from attending that event, or allow students to bar others based on race.
Everyone has a right not to associate
with people of a different race on their own time. But your tax-funded
government school is breaking the law if it sanctions or mandates this
disassociation in student clubs and events.
Parents Defending Education (PDE), which exposed the
National School Boards Association’s letter to President Joe Biden that
compared parents who attended local school board meetings to domestic
terrorists, filed a lawsuit against WPS for what it called (PDF)
a “racial segregation policy” that “violates the Fourteenth Amendment and Title
VI of the Civil Rights Act.”
The school district this week settled the lawsuit.
According to the settlement
agreement (PDF), WPS will open affinity group sessions to all students
and no longer bar students based on race.
PDE said the
settlement also includes ending a “draconian” Bias Reporting System. From the
press release (emphasis added):
Shortly after PDE filed suit, WPS suspended
the policy, which gave the school the power to punish speech simply
because others believed it was “offensive” or showed “conscious or unconscious
bias.” This procedure has been replaced and will never be reinstated.
PDE’s lawsuit and the resulting settlement
means Wellesley Public Schools may no longer treat students differently on the
basis of race while ignoring the guaranteed protections of the Fourteenth
Amendment – nor intentionally chill student speech while ignoring the
guaranteed protections of the First Amendment.
PDE president Nicole Neily said the organization is
“thrilled that Wellesley Public Schools has agreed to respect both the First
and Fourteenth Amendment rights of its students going forward. This settlement
sends a clear message that racially segregating students in public schools is
wrong – and there will be consequences. We have spent decades teaching our kids
that racial segregation was and will always be wrong. We will not tolerate a
return to segregation in 2022.”
The fight isn’t over. PDE said that affinity groups have
gained traction in other government school districts.
_____________
RELATED
ARTICLE
San
Francisco Voters Overwhelmingly Back Recall of Progressive School-Board Members
By Ryan Mills | National Review
A
pedestrian walks past a San Francisco Unified School District office building
in San Francisco, Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
San Francisco residents overwhelmingly voted to oust
three of the city’s progressive school-board members on Tuesday. It was the
culmination of a year-long effort to reform the board, which has been accused
of prioritizing social-justice politics over reopening
schools and managing the district’s troubled finances during the Covid-19
pandemic.
Returns started coming in around 9 p.m. in California,
showing that more than 70 percent of voters supported recalling each of the
three candidates: 79 percent voted to recall board member Alison Collins, 75
percent voted to recall board president Gabriela López, and 73 percent voted to
recall board member Faauuga Moliga.
Moliga conceded defeat via Twitter shortly after the first returns were
released. Turnout for the election was about 24 percent, with 119,718 of the
499,771 registered voters in San Francisco casting ballots, according to the
Department of Elections.
Democratic Mayor London Breed will now be tasked with
appointing three new members to the seven-member board. Collins, López, and
Moliga were the only members of the board who were eligible to be recalled.
Their seats are up for election again in November.
“The voters of this city have delivered a clear message
that the school board must focus on the essentials of delivering a well-run
school system above all else,” declared Breed in a prepared statement. “San
Francisco is a city that believes in the value of big ideas, but those ideas
must be built on the foundation of a government that does the essentials well.”
Tuesday’s election marked the end of a year-long recall
campaign launched by Siva Raj and Autumn Looijen, two single parents and Bay
Area tech professionals spurred to action by their frustration with the board’s
refusal to reopen the city’s schools well into the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instead of focusing its efforts on developing a reopening
plan, the board has been preoccupied with woke culture war issues, expending
energy on changing the admissions process at the highly-selective Lowell High
School to boost the number of black and Hispanic students and reduce the number
of white and Asian students; rechristening 44 schools named after prominent
Americans, including presidents Abraham Lincoln and George Washington; and a
proposal to spend close to $1 million to paint over a historic, 80-year-old
mural at a local school that depicts the life of Washington, but also includes
outdated stereotypes.
The board became the focus of national ridicule last
February after a two-hour debate over whether a gay white dad was
diverse enough to join an all-female volunteer parent committee. All the while,
the district’s budget deficit ballooned to about $125 million last year,
leading California education officials to threaten a state takeover. The
California Department of Education sent an expert in last year to help the
school board devise a plan to close the gap.
Last March, Collins was stripped of her committee
assignments and her title of vice president after recall organizers unearthed a
series of anti-Asian tweets from 2016, in which she chastised
the Asian-American community for not sufficiently speaking up against Donald Trump.
Momentum for the recall has been building for months.
Polling last summer found that about 60 percent of San Francisco residents, and
69 percent of public-school parents, favored the recall. The pro-recall
organizers brought in more than $1.9 million for their efforts, dwarfing the
roughly $86,000 raised by supporters of the three embattled board members.
Both the the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner endorsed ousting the
three board members from their seats, with the Chronicle claiming
they “failed irredeemably” to shepherd the district through the pandemic.
The Examiner editorial board wrote that the school-board
members “put political grandstanding ahead of progress for children,” and
turned the board into a “national laughingstock.”
The board members and their supporters alleged the recall
was part right-wing plot to politicize public schools and expand charters, and
part power-grab by Breed, who publicly supported their ouster.
Collins tweeted Tuesday that billionaires are attempting to
buy the school board. López has called the recall “an extreme waste of time,
energy and money.”
And yet, the recall was supported by a politically-diverse coalition, including mainstream
Democrats like Breed, some prominent local progressives, and Republicans and
conservatives.
In an interview with National Review last week,
Raj and Looijen said that once all the votes are in, they intend to begin
screening potential replacements for the board, so they can offer Breed a list
of qualified candidates to consider.
Tuesday’s vote represented only the first recall election
with the aim of removing progressive city officials this year. In June, voters
will decide whether to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s far-left district attorney.
https://news.yahoo.com/san-francisco-voters-overwhelmingly-back-123855263.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
