In a swift 4-0 vote Tuesday night, the Santa Barbara Unified School District Board of Education approved a $294,430 contract with nonprofit organization Just Communities to provide cultural proficiency and implicit bias training.
Board member Jacqueline Reid was absent.
“I believe so much in implicit bias training so that our teachers and staff have the tools to fully give every child the chance to succeed,” said board member Laura Capps. “We must finally, finally close the achievement gap. It makes me proud of our community that this program is in place.”
Capps said she remembers going to school in the Santa Barbara district in the 1980s, and that her honors and AP classes were essentially segregated.
“It is imperative that we reduce bias by actively providing students with a solid understanding of social problems while giving them the tools to combat bias and develop a critical analysis of various social conditions that are inherent in our culture,” Capps said.
The contract ballooned into a full-blown controversy after a group of anonymous parents threatened to sue the district if it adopted a curriculum they deemed racist and discriminatory against white people.
They hired Eric Early, who ran unsuccessfully for California Attorney General in 2018, and is a managing partner with the Los Angeles-based law firm Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae.
Early spoke at Tuesday’s meeting, and said that the Just Communities program would not hold up under legal scrutiny.
“We are only one race, I agree, and that’s why I am here,” Early told the school board. “We support implicit bias training; JCC crosses far over the line.”
He maintained the threat of a lawsuit.
“If this contract is entered, it will be void as a matter of law,” Early said.
The school district’s own contracted attorney, Joseph Sholder from the law firm of Griffith & Thornburgh LLC, disagreed.
“We have looked at this thoroughly, and we’re very confident that if you adopt the contract it will not be overturned,” Sholder said.
Just Communities Central Coast is a nonprofit organization that has partnered with the school district for several years to provide customized training, professional development and facilitation around issues of diversity, inclusion and equity.
Since 2013, the district has paid Just Communities more than $1 million to provide various training.
The group’s Institute for Equity in Education program is a four-and-a-half-day residential workshop for educators. The training is designed to helps teachers, counselors, administrators, parents, and other school and district staff increase their understanding of how race, socio-economic class, and individual and system-wide bias affect the learning environment.
The training, according to Just Communities, aims to provide educators with “skills, tools, and resources” to teach students from all backgrounds.
Just Communities also offers training for parents to encourage more parental engagement, and students, to help them succeed and understand each other’s backgrounds more clearly.
Parent Simon Dixon underwent the training.
“Doing the Just Communities program changed my life,” Dixon said. “I think it would change the life of anyone who goes through that program.”
Board member Kate Parker said she underwent the training in 2014.
“It was very hard,” Parker said. “It was also life changing. It was also unifying, and it made me a better school board member.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
