Denver Gazette: Enforce the law that forbids school segregation - coloradopolitics.com
Imagine a public school teaching 5- and 6-year-olds to embrace Baptist doctrines and customs. The school contains three Baptist students. During “Baptist Lives Matter at School Week of Action," teachers tell Baptist children to reject the traditions of Catholics and Jews, disrupt the families and communities of non-Baptists, and focus on developing "Baptist villages."
This would be an overt violation of Article 9, Section 8 of the Colorado Constitution. It says: “No sectarian tenets or doctrines shall ever be taught in the public school…”
That means no teacher may tell Baptists to segregate themselves into villages and focus on their Baptist identities. All should give thanks for this law because any such instruction could harm the school’s three Baptist children and all the other students who are something other than Baptist. The school should teach reading, writing, and arithmetic without advocating religious tenets and segregation based on sectarian identity. Teach children to respect one another without regard for group identities and labels.
Immediately following the Constitution’s prohibition of religious indoctrination and segregation, Article 9, Section 8, says “nor shall any distinction or classification of pupils be made on account of race or color…”
The law, updated 10 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is crystal clear. Teachers should concern themselves with the minds of students, not the religious beliefs of their families or their genetic lineages. The law puts religious identity in the same sentence, context, and category as “race” and “color.”
One cannot read this law without concluding Denver’s Centennial Elementary School is breaking it. Attorney Gen. Phil Weiser and others in law enforcement should apply the law and stop Centennial’s “Families of Color Playground Night” and open indoctrination of children to pursue segregation based on race.
The school plans to participate in Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action. The curriculum includes a commitment to “the disruption of western nuclear family dynamics." They might as well advocate disrupting Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim family dynamics to benefit three students from Baptist households.
The Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action tells teachers to emphasize 13 principles that include “transgender affirming, queer affirming” and “Black families, Black villages, Black women and unapologetically Black.”
"This specific week of action is part of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement that intends to provide a learning environment for all students for what I believe is critical reflection and honest conversation about all communities of color," Denver Public School Board President Xóchitl Gaytán told The Gazette, speaking for herself. She said a board statement is forthcoming.
"I support this ongoing movement and this critical reflection," Gaytán said.
Centennial Elementary consists of three Black children who are the primary victims of this messaging. The instruction tells them they are different and should segregate themselves into villages containing only other Blacks.
Our country has worked hard to eliminate segregation and other forms of institutional racism, so we should not be pitching racial division in schools. Doing so violates the letter of the Colorado Constitution, the spirit of the Civil Rights Act and multiple U.S. Supreme Court rulings including Brown v. Board of Education.
Weiser, Gov. Jared Polis, U.S. Attorney Cole Finnegan, and Denver City Attorney Kristin M. Bronson should enforce the law against this school and just say "no" to institutionalized, intellectual, academic segregation. It is immoral, destructive, and against modern laws and cultural mores intended to protect our children from ugly practices we long ago decided were wrong.
Denver Gazette editorial board
source: https://www.coloradopolitics.com/opinion/denver-gazette-enforce-the-law-that-forbids-school-segregation/article_f1416a6e-7ec8-11ec-afba-1f2847a86dcf.html
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