Wake class watches protest film; school board candidate complains of ‘political agenda’
Wake County middle school students watched a Black Lives Matter video about protests and vandalism last week, prompting a Wake County school board candidate to complain about a “political agenda.”
Eighth-grade students at Moore Square Middle School in Raleigh watched an online video of author Kimberly Jones saying that Black people have been playing a “fixed” real-life game of Monopoly for 450 years. She cites instances such as the 1920s burnings of Black communities by white supremacists in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Rosewood, Florida.
“You can’t win,” Jones said in the video. “The game is fixed. So when they say ‘Why do you burn down the community, why do you burn down your own neighborhood?’ It’s not ours. We don’t own anything.”
Wake County school board candidate Steve Bergstrom said the video is the latest example of how he thinks schools “continue to present inappropriate material, and bold, politically motivated lessons.” Bergstrom is running for the southwest Wake District 8 seat held by board member Lindsay Mahaffey.
“This is a clear political agenda being practiced in the classroom, teaching youth that destruction is a means to an end,” Bergstrom said in a news release Monday. “The video’s presenter demonizes the American economic structure, justifies looting and violent rioting, and does so with language and anger that I would never allow my 7th-grade son to watch.”
Bergstrom’s concerns have also been echoed online by the Wake Conservative Parents Alliance, a Facebook group that has complained in the past about other activities given by teachers. A Moore Square parent whose son was in the class also objected to the video but didn’t want to be named out of concern of retaliation.
Mahaffey told The News & Observer on Monday that she’d want to hear from the teacher the context for showing the video.
Version of video shown in dispute
On May 31, Atlanta filmmaker David Jones interviewed Kimberly Jones about the nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of white police officers in Minneapolis. The nearly seven-minute “How Can We Win” YouTube video has gone viral, with more than two million views.
Bergstrom said the students saw a version of the video that bleeps out some curse words but is still profanity-laced and says looters are “shooting their shot.” He said the video is “encouraging the looting and violence in America as a means of protest.”
But Wake County school officials said Monday that students saw a shortened, 2:35-minute version of the video that does not contain profanity or the section about “shooting their shot.” Instead, Wake says students hear Jones talking about the economic disparities Black people have faced in America since being brought over as enslaved people.
The class was studying citizen participation in societal change, part of North Carolina’s 8th-grade social studies standards, according to Lisa Luten, a school district spokeswoman. She says the class was also following the curriculum standards of evaluating the effectiveness of various approaches used to bring about change.
Luten said the school hadn’t received any complaints about the video before being contacted Monday by The News & Observer.
But Cary parent Kelly Green-Grist says it’s cases like this that were among the reasons she pulled her child out of the Wake County school system. Green-Grist heard about the video from a Moore Square parent and posted about it on the Wake Conservative Parents Alliance page.
“A teacher just needs to teach and not share their political agenda,” Green-Grist said in an interview with The News & Observer. “That’s up to the parent.”
Broughton High survey questioned
Bergstrom says there’s a repeated pattern of Wake teachers using their classes to promote their own political and personal agendas. He said an online survey taken by some students at Broughton High School in Raleigh last week that listed as a correct answer that Republicans are at fault for the “current problems with our government.”
“The outrage of parents have fallen on deaf ears of our school board members, while Wake County School System (WPCSS) continues to make national news for the breathtaking amount of agenda-driven instruction as part of official curriculum, and rogue material like this video, presented in class,” Bergstrom said in the news release.
The Broughton quiz is an example of a paper survey that students have taken for decades, according to Luten. Students add up points from their answers and discuss it with their classmates.
When the quiz was adapted for online, Luten said the program forced the teacher to randomly assign answers as correct or incorrect. Luten said students were told at the beginning of the survey that the answers were randomly assigned.
A Broughton student posted the survey online, drawing complaints from Republicans. That student had entered the class late and missed the explanation, Luten said.
Luten said neither the Broughton nor Moore Square teachers were suspended over the assignments.
“In my mind, this is something that some teachers would get suspended over,” Bergstrom said in an interview with The News & Observer on Monday. “I’m really appalled by this.”
This story was originally published September 28, 2020 at 3:10 PM.
