Critical Race Theory

[Kpow1923]

Orange County School Board Members,

The links below are samples of training from Pacific Educational Group (PEG) that you voted to contract with, committing $195K funded by the Orange County Commissioners. The PEG-Courageous Conversations training in the first two links is from Chatham County Schools and includes images from the Courageous Conversations/Beyond Diversity training that OCS board and district leaders will soon be taking. There is no denying this is CRT. Once a White person gets through the training they may be ashamed to be White. It is now their duty to set right the structural and systemic racism created and continuing by Whites. How can they remedy racism? By giving groups like PEG hundreds of thousands of dollars in a ponzi scheme. After one completes the training it is now their social justice duty to become a trainer and get more people to do the training (paying out more money) and the cycle continues. All the while PEG, a company of 27 years with 42 programs, has shown zero results that these forums and trainings have helped Black, Hispanic, Disabled, ESL..etc students learn to read and excel in math.

It is abundantly clear these training are intentionally focused on training only White people. Do you see the irony? Black coaches, consultants, trainers, and speakers educate White people about racism and charge them thousands of dollars to do so. This looks like payback for the historic treatment of Black people. Not only do these forums and trainings sew more division but create quite segregation. White people will avoid predominantly Black spaces and vice versa due to the stigma that one is the oppressed and the other is the oppressor (CRT), leading to an avoidance of one another due to feelings of guilt, shame or hate. With a magnifying glass on race it puts a hyper-focus on the differences among races and nothing to unify people. The training creates false judgements and more stereotypes. Isn't that what you want to avoid and resolve? Tearing down one race to lift up another is a poor solution to bring up reading and math test scores in OCS.

Curious if any school board members requested the materials for viewing before voting to contract? Some of you may have tried and were not successful because PEG denied your request due to intellectual property rights. Many in the community requested the board do more research with PEG before contracting. You are upheld to invest taxpayer's dollars to show a return on investment. Your return with this contract of $195K would be closing the achievement gap between Black, Hispanic, Native, Disabled, ESL, and low income students, with White and Asian students and decreasing discipline disparities among Black students. As Valerie Erhilch stated at the board meeting it is tough to get outcomes from these racial equity trainings. This was echoed by Chief Equity Officer Lee Williams when asked about the outcomes of these trainings, he "hopes and thinks" it will succeed. He has zero data to show any results from a company that has been around for almost 30 years. How about OCS finding a non-profit that offers training at no cost that has data showing their methods increase learning for ALL and reduce discipline disparities?

https://chathammonitor.substack.com/p/racial-consciousness-a-prominent

https://defendinged.org/incidents/chatham-county-schools-trains-district-level-leaders-to-explicitly-implement-critical-race-theory-into-the-school-district/

https://cei.org/blog/glenn-singletons-racism-and-the-arlington-public-schools/

https://thenewamerican.com/peg-in-schools-teaching-white-privilege-and-marxism-for-millions-in-tax-money/

https://cei.org/blog/embarrass-your-employer-while-getting-rich-off-of-diversity-scams/

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.

[Will Atherton]

On behalf of the board,  Thank you for sending in your comments and concern.

OCS does not teach CRT.

Sincerely,

Will Atherton

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Will Atherton
Chair Orange County Board of Education
Phone: 919-323-8279 | Fax: 919-732-8120 | Will.Ath...@orange.k12.nc.us
www.orangecountyfirst.com   

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