California School District Uses $2 Million of Taxpayer Funds for Equity Training
By Adam Andrzejewski for RealClearInvestigations
A California school district spent $2 million of taxpayer funds on training high school students in racial and social justice, according to records obtained by The Free Press.
Long Beach Unified School District hired Californians for Justice in 2019 to provide equity and leadership training to students and teachers in its 84 schools.
The contract, which is still ongoing, included stipends of about $1,400 for 78 students and 13 parents to participate in internships with CFJ. Additionally, Californians for Justice hosted 15 student-led training sessions for teachers, where high schoolers taught their own educators about implicit bias and racism, costing the school $25,000. Teachers skipped programs about designing lesson plans to attend these sessions, as reported by The Free Press.
CFJ’s website states that the organization’s goal is to “organize marginalized youth, particularly young people of color, immigrant, low-income, and LGBTQ youth to create the healthy, just, and vibrant schools all our communities deserve.”
Last October, the group made an Instagram post describing Israel’s war in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing and apartheid orchestrated by white supremacist settler colonialism bent on the goal of wiping out the indigenous Palestinian population.”
Auditors at OpenTheBooks found that Long Beach Unified Superintendent Jill Baker is one of the highest-paid employees in California, earning over $371,000 in 2022. Additionally, 106 more educators at the school district made over $150,000 in the same year.
History teacher Jay Goldfischer criticized CFJ’s approach, stating, “One of the reasons that [CFJ] was hired is to help our students find their voice and be able to express it, but in reality, CFJ is not helping students find their own voices. It’s giving them a scripted voice that’s not their own. They’re teaching them parroting, which is the exact opposite of how you empower children.”
Another school employee called the stipends for students and teachers a “horrible propaganda strategy.”
In response, a CFJ spokesperson told The Free Press in an email, “Our agenda is not hidden and is simple: we want the Long Beach Unified School District to be a place where every student is represented honestly in classrooms and curricula, and where they are safe to be in critical dialogue supportive of democratic participation across differences.”
It is suggested that taxpayer money allocated for such programs should be reserved for teaching core subjects like math and reading.
The information in this article was syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.