As questions mount about why Washoe County School’s social justice curriculum task force seemingly disappeared, new Superintendent Susan Enfield did not respond to a request for comment from the Silver State Times.
American Principle Project President Terry Schilling, though, offered his perspective on the issue, condemning the school district’s secrecy and calling on parents to speak up.
“While Washoe County parents should be outraged by this development, it is sadly not surprising,” Schilling said. “The woke left knows their agenda to indoctrinate kids is not popular with parents. But for years, they have managed to avoid parental accountability by keeping their curricula and school activities out of view, avoiding the backlash that inevitably comes with exposure.”
The American Principles Project is a national organization engaging directly in campaigns and advocacy on behalf of the family. In 2021, after an 11-hour school board meeting, the Washoe County School District board established a task force to review the social justice curriculum. The task force abruptly stopped meeting when Enfield came aboard. Enfield did not respond to requests for comment about the fate of the task force.
The task force was made up of 18 members with two student representatives, four teacher representatives, four community members, five parents/guardians from the five districts, and two representatives from the school’s equity and diversity department and curriculum and instruction department. The task force met monthly during the 2021-2022 academic year but went silent after its last recorded meeting on May 29, 2022.
Enfield, who previously served as interim superintendent of the Seattle school system, has a history of woke ideology in her writings and tweets.
Enfield co-authored an article titled Decentering Whiteness from Our American Schools which describes “whiteness” as a “pervasive culture” that “erases any validity of other cultures or ways of being.”
Enfield also once tweeted: “If you are a white superintendent, especially if you are serving a richly diverse community, and like me you are feeling anxious, scared, embarrassed, ashamed or uncertain—good.”
A local parents’ group, Battle Born Moms for Education, issued a statement that read in part, “We are firm believers that there is room for multiculturalism at every level. As we learn to appreciate and admire one another’s differences, we can better understand one another and build mutual respect and unity. But, ‘social justice’ focuses on shaming and blaming. It lifts one cultural group at the expense of another. No child should be subjected to divisive curricula in any form, especially at such a young age.”
Many community members have expressed concern about the intent of the task force. Joseph Morabito, a retired teacher and Reno resident, attended a public meeting and voiced his opinion.
”This curriculum is both covert and overt, even subliminal, in its intention to demonize White Men in particular; but all Whites, Western Civilization, our country by implication and Capitalism. It is very strategically designed in its sequence to indoctrinate children in K-12 to believe these things,” Morabito said.
Another retired teacher, Susan Merritt, expressed concerns as well.
“CRT is a divisive lens through which race becomes the predominant motive of all actions and relationships,” and that “[i]nstead of infecting young minds with the hostility and ethnic stereotypes inherent in CRT, the curriculum for our schools needs to emphasize personal responsibility, motivation toward self-sufficiency, and a shared sense of national identity through the basic subjects of Reading, Writing, Math, History, Science, and the Arts.”
The task force “threatened to shine a light on all that woke activists were doing in the district,” Schilling said. “No doubt the new superintendent hopes disbanding the task force will lead to a quiet return to the old status quo, and they can once again inject their radical ideology into the classroom without consequences. Parents must keep up the fight despite this setback. The stakes are simply too high to surrender – our kids’ future is on the line.”
Accuracy in Media, meanwhile, has collected footage of educators at schools in Ohio and Utah admitting to deceptively reinstating these controversial matters into the classroom.
