Fort Worth Independent School District Spends Big Money on Equity Consultants and Programming
Incidents
In July 2021, Texas Scorecard published a report, detailing how much the Fort Worth ISD spends each year on diversity consultants and programming. A single meeting with a consultant from the Pacific Educational Group cost the district $1,650, and the report noted: “For the four meetings held between late February and early March of 2016, the consulting fees for seminars and equity walks cost the district more than $41,000.”
The Pacific Educational Group describes its work as “forging racial equity.”
More from the Texas Scorecard piece:
Those seminars came with a price. The Pacific Education Group (PEG) has partnered with FWISD to provide training and consulting for their program, Courageous Conversations.
Texas Scorecard requested invoices from PEG and found that the district has spent more than a million dollars on consulting fees, training seminars, and equity walks since 2015.
The consulting fees for a PEG employee to attend one equity meeting in August of 2016 cost the district $1,650. The meetings for the Race Equity Committee only last an average of an hour and a half. For the four meetings held between late February and early March of 2016, the consulting fees for seminars and equity walks cost the district more than $41,000.
The annual licensing fee for more than 3,000 teachers during the 2018-2019 school year was $25,300, based on an invoice dated July 13, 2018; in the 2019-2020 school year, the licensing fees totaled $26,565.
On March 24, 2018, Courageous Conversations spoke at the FWISD Race Equity Summit. The cost to the district—for one person to speak twice—was $6,000.
The Pacific Education Group also charged the district $22,300 for consulting with My Brother’s Keeper, an organization founded by Barack Obama that has a chapter in FWISD. Insider videos of the organization show how students are treated and being taught to participate in militant chants.
Furthermore, during the 2020-21 school year, the district budgeted over $2 million dollars for the operating expenses and salaries of the diversity consultants employed by the school and the programs they run. Chief Equity Officer Sherry Breed at FWISD received over $202,318 alone in her annual salary from the district with other Equity office employees making over $120,000 annually.
Earlier, the district passed a resolution on fighting racial inequality, describing police practices as being rooted in “…White supremacy stemming from night patrols, slave patrols, and the Texas Rangers” and noting that “racial injustice is systemic and deeply rooted in the history of our country.”
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