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Dear Bellevue School Board and All,
It’s been a few weeks since Bellevue School District had 5 community cafes around so called racial equity topics, supposedly for the district to listen to the communities. There was a huge turnout of parents voicing objections against it, many repeatedly requested a follow up meeting to report to the entire community, its equity director even acknowledged and promised such. To this date we have not heard back anything about such follow-up, and the district has not disclosed what the findings are, including numbers such as parent attendance, district employee attendance, how many district affiliates and vendors attended. Yet, district employees are still on schedule to attend and to present at this “Equity from the boardroom to the classroom” conference ( http://wasa-oly.org/wasa/Equity18 ) May 23rd at DoubleTree SeaTac.
It looks as if community input were just a procedural public show. I’m looking at the board right here in front of me, I can see disparities and lack of equity in a few ways, shall I jump to the conclusion that there must be systemic and institutionalized discrimination ? Shall we start doing equity from this boardroom first before poisoning our classrooms?
Few people knew about the existence of this equity department until recently, we have already seen its divisive practices across the district in retrospect, such as regular school staff equity indoctrination, speakers with extreme view of identity politics and party politics, so called BOOM and SHOUT events treating different groups of students based on their skin color and gender.
Although school district is still very good, we have observed deteriorating trend during the past a few years, roughly the same period that this equity department has been operating since 5 years ago. People already commented lowering graduation rates and steady rise of school violence reported over the years at last board meetings. District’s high school national rankings also slipped down a few notches.
I’d like to remind the board that this is Eastside, not socialist Seattle, where government failures are always rewarded with additional taxes and additional bureaucrats. I call for disband of the equity department and make the district accountable to the taxpayers.
Thank you!
Kan Qiu