LiberatED: Fremont Unified School District 

In March 2025, the Fremont Unified School District adopted its Ethnic Studies curriculum in the 2024/2025 school year for all 9th-grade students, stating it will become a requirement for the 2025-2026 school year. The district has been offering Ethnic Studies as an upper-level elective course since 2003.

The course description reads: “In this interdisciplinary course, students will begin with an examination of identity: exploring their own culture and heritage, and questioning their place in American society and the world. Through this course, students will analyze historic and contemporary systems of oppression focusing on the experiences of historically marginalized groups, while also exploring the resistance efforts and social movements for equity as a response to the aforementioned oppression. Some of these topics include but are not limited to racism, sexism, immigration/migration, climate justice, and current political/global dynamics. The course seeks to create a safe space for students to critically analyze, discuss, reflect, and act with empathy and allyship among and between their communities.”

The district cites that the course is meant to satisfy California state law requiring school districts to begin offering ethnic studies courses by the 2025-2026 school year, but Governor Newsom’s 2025–26 budget did not include ongoing funding. Its implementation is on pause as a result.

FUSD educators are working together to create a course, which is modeled after the California Department of Education’s model curriculum.

The course will focus on four foundational disciplines: African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies to learn about the “histories, cultures, struggles, and contributions to American society of these historically marginalized peoples.”

The course outline states that “Ethnic studies courses address institutionalized systems of advantage and address the causes of racism and other forms of bigotry including but not limited to, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, xenophobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia within our culture and governmental policies.”