By Scott Smyers
According to this letter from the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights, the Acton Boxborough Regional School District has until about March 1 to extract all aspects of DEI from the AB school system. This may seem overwhelming, but it is simple, just stop discriminating against white and Asian people. They can continue to solicit employees that are not white or Asian people and hire them if they are the best qualified for the position. Any applicant, employee or student must be treated equally and fairly. All the other supposed functions of DEI (Divide Extort and Impugn) are covered by overlapping services, making it redundant, at best. For example, people sometimes claim DEI is mostly for helping disabled people. – 1. that’s not how they sold it 5 years ago and 2. disabled people are already covered by many laws, programs and policies.
As we all know, the School District and Town have priorities out of step with the citizens and the spending has been terribly managed over the past 4 plus years combined with some bad economic luck. Together, this makes for challenging budgets in the immediate future.
Why risk losing 1.7 MILLION dollars of Federal funds so they can feel morally superior and continue to discriminate against white and Asian students and staff? It isn’t fair to anyone.
I encourage all voters of Acton and Boxborough to observe closely every public discussion or written response to this topic for any sneaky behavior like changing names of programs/policies, personnel titles, etc.
The DOE letter only requires that all the policies follow the law. If not, more and more parents and citizens will submit complaints directly against the ABRSD using this new portal and email their concerns to the Acton Finance Committee (fincom@actonma.gov).
I expect to be disappointed in any upcoming actions taken by the local school administrators or committee members, but maybe some are so dedicated to this cause (discrimination against white and Asian people), that they will make some over-the-top statements and resign. That would be OK, but not as good as cleaning up the negative cultural force of DEI and keeping the $1.7 Million.
I’d encourage ABRSD to ween itself off Federal funding altogether regardless of this mandate. Find $1.7m in cuts or ask the town for some more money. Trump and his cronies are purely transactional. They have no use for a town or State that votes 60%+ Democrat. They will find some way of taking the money at some point in the future anyway. Better to plan for the inevitable now and become independent as soon as possible.
DEI is one of the things that cost Democrats the election and it seems like they still don’t get why. DEI as it’s often naively implemented is discriminatory if it takes opportunity from one person and gives it to someone else. Acton is much better served keeping the $1.7 M funding and using that for teachers.