Youngkin administration bashes state teachers union for distributing Black Lives Matter materials

The VEA’s Department of Human and Civil Rights sent its members the toolkit, which includes sample lesson plans that include teachings on racial identity and the Black Lives Matter movement. It is unclear how or if teachers used the lesson plans.

Youngkin spokeswoman Macaulay Porter said the toolkit will not be tolerated.

“The Administration will not support a teachers union’s attempts to prop up a politically driven curriculum toolkit which contains tenets that go beyond teaching history, lesson plans, and operates as a political manual for the next generation of Virginia’s students,” Porter said in an email. “Virginia’s schools will continue to teach all history — the good and the bad.”

Porter did not respond to questions about which aspects of the toolkit the administration opposes.

The BLM at School toolkit lists “empathy” and “diversity” as some of its guiding principles. It also mentions “disruption of the Western nuclear family dynamics” and “recognizing (transgender)-antagonistic violence.”

“Based on how the Governor’s budget staggeringly underfunds majority Black school divisions, you might think he believes Black Lives Don’t Matter in schools,” VEA President James Fedderman said in a statement. “Budgets and actions reflect values, and until he shows up for Black students with the resources they have been denied, his overt political attacks will continue to ring hollow.”

On Youngkin’s inauguration day in January 2022, he signed his first executive order which called for ending “the use of inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory,” in Virginia K-12 public education.

Critical race theory, a framework mostly taught in law schools, is the theory that racial bias is baked into U.S. laws and institutions. But a few years ago, it became a catch-all term used largely by conservatives to describe lessons about race they deem too radical.

The Youngkin administration in September proposed K-12 transgender policies that would require student participation in school athletics to be based on a student’s birth sex and require students to use school bathrooms that match their birth sex “except to the extent that federal law otherwise requires.”

“We’re not afraid to say it: Black students should have a safe and nurturing environment in our schools and their lives matter. It seems Governor Youngkin disagrees,” Fedderman said in a statement. “While Youngkin wants to suppress all conversations about our past in schools, we know, as educators, that students are courageous enough to reconcile with our imperfect past so they can come together and make a better future.”

Criticisms of Youngkin’s stance on teaching history came to a head over the past six months after the administration rewrote the state’s proposed K-12 history standards to include more patriotism and remove teachings about the ongoing legacy of slavery in the U.S.

One board member who supported the Youngkin standards, Suparna Dutta, was removed from the State Board of Education this week by Senate Democrats following comments she made in support of the Youngkin history standards.