A Sartell-St. Stephen School District student is speaking out after the school required grade-school children to take an equity survey.
The survey asked questions that some students didn’t understand. Even after hearing an explanation from their teacher, some still couldn’t comprehend the survey questions.
But a teacher told the students they couldn’t ask their parents for help, according to student Haylee Yasgar.
“My teacher said that I could not skip any questions even when I didn’t understand them. One question asked us what gender we identify with. I was very confused along with a lot of other classmates,” Yasgar said during Monday night’s meeting.
She said students were told they could not “repeat any of the questions to our parents.”
The school district hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment. It’s unclear what value a survey holds if respondents don’t understand the questions.
“Being asked to hide this from my mom made me very uncomfortable, like I was doing something wrong,” she told the school board.
The equity survey is part of a reckoning of how school systems nationwide should teach issues related not only to sexuality but as well as race in a state where George Floyd died in police custody last year.
Now that the city settled a lawsuit for $27 million and former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for third-degree murder and manslaughter, the question now remains how school systems should explain similar events to children.
Some parents call the curriculum divisive while supporters say it’s teaching history and showing how racist attitudes and activities such as redlining are embedded into daily life.
Despite being more than 40 years old, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has evolved to a flashpoint between political parties over the past year.
CRT holds that “the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans,” according to Britannica.
CRT scholars allege many societal problems are rooted in the country’s white majority using laws and other power to suppress the non-white population, whether consciously or subconsciously.
CRT opponents claim its conclusions rely on anecdotes and storytelling, rather than a comprehensive examination of evidence. They say its supporters focus on disproportionate outcomes from those individual stories, incorrectly drawing conclusions about institutional racism and white privilege and failing to take into account strides that the nation has made toward racial equality.
Critics say CRT employs heavy use of the Marxist “struggle” ideology and tactic that advocates for the destruction of history, traditions, and culture of a society.
Around the United States, there has been a growing movement of parents who have become increasingly dissatisfied with the CRT-derived curriculum being taught in their children’s classrooms.
