Francis Howell School District seeks to change the verbiage in their black history curriculum to reduce pushback from the “highly conservative county…Trump country”

Incidents


In a video published on Rumble, July 7, 2021, Francis Howell School District discusses their Black History curriculum. Dr. King, the district’s hired equity consultant answers questions from faculty, including (9.48):

“We’re in a highly conservative county…and we are in the middle of Trump country here…and anytime in my career when we’ve attempted with staff, attempted with kids, families, to even, even, touch on the concept of white privilege uh, we get just incredible amounts of push back and fear…what suggestions do you have for us in being prepared for that…”

“Do we have to use that particular verbiage or can we use other type of terminology to kind of get to that?”

The author of the Rumble video posted the following:

Rumble — Watch supporters of the proposed Black History course in the Francis Howell School District (in St Charles County, MO) present their sanitized sales pitches in public. Then go behind the scenes to see how Dr. King, their consultant (paid $15K by the district), sets them up to write a Critical Theory based history curriculum and hide it from parents. Finally, there are several minutes of questions asked by teachers and counselors in the district (answered by Dr. King) as they attempt to plan how to bypass parent concerns and hide the content of the curriculum in a push for social justice. This video is clipped from the full presentation for the sake of time, but the intent and meaning of speakers’ comments has not been changed.

All content in this video was obtained from publicly available sources as well as Sunshine requests through the school district, per Missouri state law. It was edited using Pinnacle Studio 23 Ultimate.

For reference, the proposed Black History curriculum is at https://go.boarddocs.com/mo/fhsdmo/Board.nsf/files/C3LKDX4FDF2B/$file/Black%20History%20Curriculum.pdf, and the related proposed Black Literature curriculum is at https://go.boarddocs.com/mo/fhsdmo/Board.nsf/files/C3KHVF4A5164/$file/Black%20Literature%20Curriculum.pdf.

Additionally, a revealing article by Dr. King where he lays out his beliefs in Critical Race Theory and Critical Pedagogy, as well as how they relate to Marxism, can be found at https://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/education/research/units/museum/current_programs/chaange/documents/critical_inquiries.pdf.

More Resources

Francis Howell School District hires fierce supporter of Critical Race Theory to help develop race-based curriculum, The Heartlander