The parade of county school board meetings here in Kentucky being taken over by angry white parents protesting "critical race theory" (when what they are really against is any effort to improve the situation for Kentucky's Black kids) continues, this time in Oldham County near Louisville.
A week after protesters derailed a school board meeting in Kentucky's largest district, discord around "critical race theory" dominated another school board meeting Monday.
Most of the 25 people who spoke during the public comment portion of an Oldham County school board meeting Monday evening opposed the majority-white, affluent district's diversity efforts, falsely believing them to be "critical race theory."
"What is equity?" one woman asked. "It is to take something where someone earned it and go on and give it to someone else."
She, along a handful of other parents, said she will keep her son home and teach him herself.
"And I will encourage other parents to do it," she said. "Because this does not need to happen in our great county and our great schools."
Critical race theory is an academic framework that examines how racism is baked into and perpetuated by systems and policies, rather than individual actions. It is typically not taught in K-12 schools, and Oldham County officials said it is not taught in the district.
But the phrase has come to be used as an umbrella term for any kind of equity work in schools, as well as ideologies that see students solely based on race.
A conservative-led push against CRT, and often racial equity work, has caused a wave of legislation that would stifle conversations about race in classrooms and a flood of opponents to school board meetings, demanding that the theory be eradicated from classrooms it is not in.
Outgoing Superintendent Greg Schultz began his final school board meeting with a brief update on the district’s Inclusion Coalition but did not provide details or draw a reaction from the crowd.
Started in March 2019, the group of district and school officials, teachers and staff reviewed disparities in discipline and achievement, and the effects of "racism and social marginalization" on students.
More than four-fifths of Oldham County students are white; around one-fifth live at or near the poverty line.
Black students make up about 2% of Oldham County's more than 12,000 kids. Like in other districts, they receive a disproportionate amount of suspensions and face double-digit achievement gaps in test scores compared to their white peers.
Several speakers appeared to misunderstand what the coalition's job is, falsely saying white students are told they are inherently racist or should feel bad due to their skin color. Such beliefs are not taught in school and are not part of critical race theory’s teachings.
So two things, first of all Louisville Courier-Journal education reporter Olivia Trauth is 100% correct in this story. "Critical Race Theory" is absolutely being used as a catch-all bogeyman for efforts of racial inclusion in a district where only 2% of kids are Black, and it's being used around the country right now to apply to any efforts in any field of anything socially related.
Secondly, if this is happening in small-town Kentucky, it's happening where you live too. I stress once again that people need to get involved in local politics, and especially in school board meetings if you have kids in public school.
This is going to be the battle cry of 2022 and 2024 and we're not going to win if we ignore this nonsense.
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