A Colorado schools superintendent has had enough of certain White people.
Tony Byrd, superintendent of the Summit School District in Frisco, complained at a January professional development session about the “privileged White people” who sit on the local School Accountability Committee and District Accountability Committee.
“I get 100% drained from DAC. I get drained from SAC. I get drained, I just get drained from privileged White people,” Mr. Byrd said in an audio recording obtained by Parents Defending Education and shared with The Washington Times.
The two state-mandated committees, which include parents, community members and school representatives, are charged with making recommendations to school and district officials on school performance.
“It just absolutely drains me,” said Mr. Byrd, who is White. “And I’m trying to figure out how to manage that, but it sucks the soul out of me, and those are the people that find me, because they’ve got access.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Byrd, it appears that his job requires him to interact with numerous White people, some of whom may also be privileged.
The student body of the school district, nestled in Colorado ski country near the Arapahoe Basin, Loveland and Breckenridge resorts, is 56% White, 39% Hispanic and less than 1% Black, Asian, or American Indian, according to U.S. News Education.
Erika Sanzi, director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, took issue with the superintendent’s disparaging racial comments.
“Expressing contempt for people because of their race is wrong,” Ms. Sanzi said. “It has always been wrong. And a superintendent betrays the trust of those he serves when he makes generalizations about them based on the color of their skin, whatever color that may be.”
Leading the racially focused session was education consultant Jesse Tijerina, who stressed the importance of “educational stakeholders” moving from “woke to work.”
“Man, I hear a lot of people think that they’re woke and man, they’re not woke. They’re weak. You know?” Mr. Tijerina said. “It’s about from woke to work.
He credited recent events with moving the culture away from “color blindness,” including the 2020 presidential election, the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the George Floyd protests and the pandemic.
“If you’ve experienced that which we all have in the last 10 years, we all know that color, identity, sexuality, socio-economics, all those things play a role in how we educate kids,” Mr. Tijerina said. “We can no longer say that it doesn’t exist, that it doesn’t matter, so we are all emerging from blindness.”
He also expounded on “Whiteness,” saying that “Whiteness is not so much a color but a way of doing things.”
He acknowledged there are “other intersectionalities” such as “gender, sexual identity, bicultural,” but said that “I always go back to race.”
“When I think about even LGBTQ, my experience in supporting students that are transgender — White transgender youth and the treatment they receive is much different than the treatment that a Black transgender youth receives,” he said. “Not only overtly, but systemically. So I always go back to race.”
Mr. Tijerina works for the nearby Thompson School District, but the district told The Washington Times that he “was not on the district’s payroll on the day that he held the trainings.”
“His position within Thompson School District as the director of state and federal programs does not incorporate his consultancy work in any way and the district has not utilized Mr. Tijerina in any trainings of this type,” the district said in a statement.
The Washington Times has reached out to the Summit School District for comment.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.