A group of parents is suing the Albemarle County, Virginia, school board over curriculum they say promotes radical ideology and teaches kids to discriminate based on race.
On Friday, a preliminary motion for injunction was filed on behalf of the parents by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the group representing the parents. They hope to stop the implementation of the district’s “anti-racism” policy, which parents say teaches kids to adopt racial stereotypes and that certain people can’t succeed because of their skin color.
In a statement to The Daily Wire, Carlos Ibañez, one of the parents involved in the suit, said that what the kids were being taught amounted to racism.
“Teaching our children they can’t succeed because of the color of their skin is wrong. I don’t think any child, including my own, should be taught that people are better or worse simply based on the color of their skin. That’s not ‘anti-racist’—that’s racism,” Ibañez said.
Albemarle adopted its “anti-racism” policy in 2019 and ran a pilot program of the policies in the Spring of 2021.
The parents hope that a judge will stop the implementation of practices or policies they say leads to promoting racial stereotypes, protect the viewpoints of students with differing views, stop teaching ideas they say leads to racial discrimination, and protect student’s religious beliefs.
A ruling on this motion, which might take several months, would be temporary before final adjudication would take place. Last week, the Albemarle School Board filed to stop the suit, with lawyers stating that, “Addressing racism is uncontrovertibly a legitimate pedagogical interest.”
ADF argues that the results of the new policy have actually been more discrimination and not less.
According to court filings, during the implementation of a pilot program of the ‘anti-racism’ policy, students were told that “white, Christian students are ‘dominant’” and that they oppress “‘subordinate’” non-Christian and non-white people.
One Latina student says that she was told that she was oppressed because of her race and that “she was shown a video that was hostile to her Catholic faith.” Another student who is white, black, and Native American said that he was “uncomfortable with the intense focus on race by the school.”
Lawyers for the parents say that the implementation of the new policy violates student protections under the Virginia constitution.
“Every student deserves to be treated equally under the law regardless of their race, their ethnicity their religion, and yet Albemarle County School district has adopted a policy that is attacking and demeaning students based on those characteristics,” Kate Anderson, an ADF lawyer working on the case, told The Daily Wire.
She also said that there had been a teacher training that was designed to instruct teachers on how to teach students based on the policy, which she said was based on the tenets of Critical Race Theory.
“They have also mandated they will be making changes and they have started to make changes in every classroom in every grade to bring teaching and class instruction in line with their new policy and their Critical Race Theory ideology. All of that is treating children different on the basis of race,” Anderson added.
Albemarle School District did not respond to request for comment.