New Trier Township High School District 203 equity liaison signed up for training sessions on “exploring justice for Palestine” and “settler colonialism”; journalism students were encouraged to use sources funded by the government of Qatar

Parents Defending Education submitted a public records request to the New Trier Township High School District 203 seeking emails from staff regarding Israel. One email that PDE received was from Pat Savage-Williams and is dated February 13, 2024. Her email signature has her listed as the district’s “New Trier Equity Liaison” and “SEED Facilitator/Equity Team Co-Chair.” She had received an invitation for two sessions that would focus on “exploring justice for Palestine, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of the historical context, current challenges, and potential paths toward justice” from the organization SEED. The email continued to explain:

We have a shared interest in promoting informed discussions on global issues, particularly settler colonialism, and we believe that addressing the complexities and misconceptions surrounding the Palestinian cause can contribute to promoting anti-racism and dismantling systems of oppression.

Pat Savage-Williams responded: “Thank you for offering this! I signed up for both sessions.” A public records request to the Evanston Township High School District 202 previously revealed that she participated in a “White Privilege Conference” as that district’s School Board president. During the presentation that she gave at this conference, she explained that the Evanston Township High School District 202 had established a cohort to “explore Critical Race Theory.”

In another email that PDE received, the New Trier Township High School District 203’s student newspaper New Trier News sent an email out to several students and staff. The email appears to have been sent by an adviser. The email was a notice for a meeting: “This meeting is for editors and the New Trier Equity Liaisons. If you are an Advanced Journalism student/staff writer/staff artist, you may receive this invite, but you are not required to attend this meeting.” Student editors were told to watch a video from the news outlet Al Jazeera Plus, which is funded by the government of Qatar. The video promotes biased journalism that claims Israel is committing “war crimes” and “occupation.” The video is dated December 18, 2023.

Students were also directed to a video from the New Yorker magazine titled “Rewriting Racist Headlines.” The video starts with the narrator saying: “I think everything’s about race. Black communities, gay communities, immigrant communities feel a lot of media representation to be inadequate, biased.” The narrator claimed to be using “restorative justice” to rewrite headlines that were deemed racist from The New York Times. This narrator kept changing headlines to make them focus more on race. One headline was changed to specifically mention “White-American” to describe a person charged with a crime. She then attacked former President Donald Trump: “And if you don’t see yourself as maybe just as much of a problem in some ways as Trump, then what work are you doing?”

Another source for students in the email was a link to an interview from Mother Jones magazine. The interview was with a person that Mother Jones described as “the deputy director of Arab Center Washington DC, a research institute affiliated with the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies.” This is the second source in the email linked to Qatar that students are asked to view. This person claims that Israel is an “occupying power.”

Students are specifically told to consider reading “Al Jazeera English” and “Democracy Now.” Al Jazeera is funded by the government of Qatar, and Democracy Now is rated as aligning with “liberal, progressive, or left-wing thought and/or policy agendas.” Pat Savage-Williams is also included in this email.