Susan Mehiel is a local resident of Indian River County and an advocate for education that focuses on the individual student. She rejects the modern group think of what she terms, “Education Inc.” and the concepts of CRT, DEI and other concepts founded in modern Progressive theory.
The attached column from the Wall Street Journal last month, “Pop Goes the DEI Bubble” brought back memories of our early days following the actions of the school district. You may recall, they were all set to hire a highly paid DEI Senior Officer when we heard about the plan set in motion to change the nature of our schools and teaching.
Through our collective efforts on all fronts, the position went away and instead, they created a lower-level position or two and added many objectives to other administrative job descriptions. It’s hard to quantify how much it still costs us annually; the Senior Officer was $120,000+ annually. But we need to keep all of this in mind along with the fact there’s been a dramatic increase in district administrative overheads country-wide for the past 10 years.
Taking a look at the article, “the rise of DEI a “long march through the institutions”—a 50-plus-year ideology infiltration into universities, K-12 schools, government, media and corporations with the goal of telling us all how to live…” We charted much of this including the Common Core debacle, and Education Inc. which we found in the universities, NGO’s, curriculum developers, book publishers, bureaucrats, and unions.
Our next foray was into the new curriculum selection for K-5 English Language Arts. “The new societal design, embedded in DEI and ESG, envisioned idyllic communal progress.” Social Emotional Learning (SEL) was their way of selling the 'community' over the individual. We saw this in the kindergarten direction to “embrace Culturally Responsive Teaching” (CRT in disguise) with LBGTQ books in the reading area and "discuss Community Police Relations, Environmental Issues and Race Relations" with 5-year-olds!
After much work and time, we managed to beat back the Progressive Virtue Signalers at the district, and we successfully took down the bad curriculum. Of course, that didn’t stop them from trying to implement the LBGTQ standards (you're "assigned" a gender at birth), which we also railed against. Looking back, it was hard work but with the aid of laws, common sense and committed community members, the School District saw the light of day and ended many of these practices.
As we have in the past, the columnist relates this to a move toward social engineering and Marxism which we concluded, too. And as he points out…it leads to authoritarianism. Concerned parents have been accused of wanting to not teach “real or Black History" but they weren't the ones tearing down statues to erase history! Most recently, it was shown that the federal government pressured Amazon to remove books or suppress searches of them if they didn’t support vaxing…you want to talk authoritarianism and book banning?
So, we’ve worked cooperatively with the district through two more curriculum reviews, Math and most recently Social Studies/Civics/History, and we’re pleased to say our choices won the day in the latter group, which will soon be purchased for the 2024-25 school year. We celebrate their cooperation and the improved reading and math scores and higher graduation rates…but the work isn’t over.
It’s time to review the targeting of reading instruction in all grades including grades 6, 7, 8, where we're seeing the test scores drop precipitously. We also suggest an increase in Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten programs for children not getting reading readiness preparation at home. We have seen information about Truancy Rates that are concerning as well as Senior course make-up programs that boost graduation rates without skills achievement.
And about those DEI costs and growing administrative expenses – Big Picture: would repositioning those funds toward teaching improvements – like teacher salaries, Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten Programs, Middle School concentrations where we don't want to lose them, and special interventions/materials – be a better use of our tax dollars based on priorities?
In the coming months we’ll explore these areas and more and let you know what we find. There’s always a need to monitor how an agency is using our tax dollars and our school district is no exception. In the meantime, there’s a cautionary tale from the columnist… “Preferred pronouns are fading. …DEI departments are being deconstructed. But while the DEI movement may have peaked, …it’s not dead yet. The feverish whining of those grasping for the last reins of power will probably get worse before DEI eventually dies with a whimper.”
A reminder...As we move into a new election season, don't lose sight of the fact that the two incumbent school board candidates celebrated the possibility of a new DEI Senior Position and voted to accept a terrible ELA curriculum despite being shown the DEI and Social Emotional Learning features steeped in the texts and teacher manuals. Either a part of Education Inc. or a supporter of it, they made bad choices for our students.
Stay Tuned!
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Yep. There are forces among us, but have not stopped for decades. Perhaps even millennia.