In March of 2019, an incident happened at McCormick Jr. High School in Cheyenne that shocked the entire community. One junior-high student placed four or five posters with terrible and unconscionable statements in the school. The posters were taken down before the school day began and the student was suspended.
In the following months, Laramie County School Board #1 hired a “Diversity Coordinator” and began to implement new strategies in an effort to ensure that such incidents would not happen again. Sadly, as part of that effort, LCSD#1 turned to a program from Metropolitan State University-Denver called the Western Educational Equity Assistance Center or WEEAC.
WEEAC is an organization that:
- Provides teaching resources from the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that has placed two highly respected family policy organizations on its “hate list”, putting them in the same category as Nazi skinheads and extremist groups.
- Provides resources from the Anti-Defamation League, which over the last several years has promoted legislation that would target people of faith who hold to a scientific and biblical understanding of human sexuality.
- Provides a list of 24 “anti-racist” books, including books from Ibrim X. Kendi and Robin Diangelo, among others, which promote Critical Race Theory, a theory derived from Marxism. Kendi calls capitalism and racism “conjoined twins” and attacks capitalism as racist.
- Includes a resource list that, under the heading of LGBTQ+, features an entire list of materials promoting ideas such as “intersectionality” as well as “queer and trans artists.”
But here’s what’s not on the resource list: any group that would provide a balanced worldview.
Now, in Laramie County School District #1, a new private “Climate Survey” from WEEAC will be administered to students on May 12. In spite of calls for the survey questions to be made public to parents, the school district has claimed that the information is proprietary. The idea of this being proprietary when the questions will be given to every student from 5th grade and up makes the claim implausible at best. At Family Policy Alliance of Wyoming, we believe that nothing taught or given to students should be withheld from parents.
For a number of years, LCSD#1 has used a peer-reviewed program (and survey) from the Olweus Institute that has shown a steady and dramatic drop in bullying incidents over the past decade. Moving from the Olweus survey to the WEEAC survey is more about promoting a political agenda than addressing the issue at hand.
We are asking for you to write to the school board and stop the survey. Please Click here to email the school board today.
And please share with others in Wyoming – and especially anyone in Laramie County!
Sincerely,
Nathan Winters
Executive Director