Students, families, and activists have united in opposition to a Missouri school district’s decision to cancel two elective classes in Black studies, a move some students say is grounded in uplifting and maintaining white supremacy.
Even after the board decided to bring the classes back one week after the meeting—vowing the courses would be taught from a “politically-neutral” viewpoint—students have continued to fight against what they fear could be a “whitewashed curriculum.”
“[They] want to teach [Black history] from a whitewashed perspective,” education activist Heather Fleming told The Daily Beast, “that still deifies white supremacy.”
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The Francis Howell School District in St. Charles County—just outside St. Louis—held its monthly board meeting on Dec. 21, 2023. However, advocates for Black history and literature courses say some board members, including president Adam Bertrand and vice president Randy Cook, slid the vote onto the agenda in a sneaky, last-minute move.
“I’m really tired of the different things coming on at the last minute without sharing it with the other board members at an adequate time to look at things,” Francis Howell School District Director Janet Stiglich said before the vote to adopt the agenda. “That’s why I’m not approving this agenda. To have a change in an item agenda put on at 6 o’clock last night is not fair to any of us.”
The room erupted in applause.
During the nearly three-and-a-half-hour meeting, people in the crowd displayed signs saying “RESPECT FHSD DIVERSITY” and “SUPPORT OUR MARGINALIZED STUDENTS AND FAMILIES.” Issues concerning the LGBTQ+ community were also addressed, as meeting attendees waved transgender flags from their seats.
“Every board meeting this year seems to find a new way to lower the bar,” parent Harry Harris said. “I’m absolutely disgusted at the last-minute add of the removal of the anti-bias framework of the Black history lit[erature] classes, and it is obviously—OBVIOUSLY—a thinly veiled attempt to undermine those classes. For over two years now, those elective classes…have moved along just fine with plenty of students… describing just how it has impacted them and how great it has been.”
Harris said he didn’t even expect the Francis Howell Board of Education “was capable of stooping to” something so “cowardly” when the district slid the vote onto the agenda.
“But you certainly taught me to not underestimate how low you will go to show your disdain for the Black and brown community, experiences, and existence,” he said, calling it a “district of crisis.”
Another public speaker, Jennifer Main, blasted the board for a lack of transparency and “repeatedly add[ing] items to the board agenda last minute… right before they’re not eligible to be added anymore.”
Parent Carrie Ziolkowski, who said her son was enrolled in the Black literature class, said the school board continues to push “culture war issues and fail to make decisions to serve all students and families in the district.”
Ahead of the vote, board president Bertrand accused the Black studies classes of being influenced by Southern Poverty Law Center social justice standards for “teaching tolerance of anti-bias framework.” But despite a heavy barrage of attendees speaking out against the vote to remove the courses, board members voted 5-2 to nix them from the high school curriculum. Stiglich and district director Chad Lange attempted and failed to amend the agenda item to give students and families more time to speak out against the vote since it was introduced so late to the public. They were also the two dissenting votes.
“I was made aware of the agenda changing at the same time as the public,” Lange told The Daily Beast in an email. “I had no prior knowledge of any discussions that had taken place between other board members and administrators.”
Lange explained that he was part of the board when the classes were developed for the 2021-2022 academic year.
“We do not just remove any other courses while a curriculum is being rewritten, some classes have been using 12 year old curriculum[s]!” he wrote. “I offered to amend the motion that evening, one that would have kept the courses as is while it was being worked on, it was denied that evening by a 5-2 vote. I was proud to approve these courses and am extremely disappointed in this outcome.”
He added that he trusted the educators and “highly educated staff members who pour their heart and souls into [the] students on a daily basis.”
Following the vote, students began to organize to protect Black studies in the district.
First, an online petition was launched by Harper Schneider, a sophomore at Francis Howell North.
“Francis Howell School District students have created this petition to voice our strong opposition to the board’s decision to remove Black History and Black Literature from our course offerings. We value learning about the history of all people and advocate for a diverse, equitable, and inclusive education for every student,” read the petition. “The removal of the Black History and Black Literature courses not only deprives students of understanding significant parts of American history, but also undermines the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion that are foundational in education and in the workforce. DEI is crucial for preparing students to be successful after graduation.”
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Schneider, a white student and the daughter of Ziolkowski, said she had plans to take the history class during her senior year. She also said she felt the board snuck the item on the agenda purposefully while the district was on winter break because she didn’t “think they wanted people to talk about the issue and not really find out about it.”
Students for Francis Howell, an activist organization co-founded by Schneider, was also created to spread awareness about the school board’s decision just 24 hours after the vote.
“Currently, our goal is just to really put information out there... and get everyone in the community involved,” said Francis Howell North senior Lauren Chance, a co-founder of Students for Francis Howell.
While speaking with The Daily Beast, Chance, who is Black, said she wanted the school board to be more considerate with their decisions.
“I wish they would just kind of, like, listen to the people in the community and take what we think into consideration because, essentially, it affects us,” she said. “The hard part is, I genuinely don’t think these board members are going to change their viewpoints, and I think the only way to help with the issues taking place in Francis Howell School District is to have different board members.”
On Dec. 28, a week after the board’s vote, Bertrand and district superintendent Kenneth Roumpos announced that the classes would be brought back—just modified to be more “politically neutral.”
“After thorough discussions, we believe that there is an appropriate path forward to offer Black History and Black Literature with an updated curriculum standard,” the statement posted to the district’s Facebook page read. “We are confident in our academic team’s ability to bring forth a curriculum that is rigorous and largely politically neutral—one that will meet the board’s approval on a timeline that prevents interruption of course offerings.”
There were over 400 replies to the post, with many questioning how the classes could be “politically neutral.”
In an email to The Daily Beast, Cook said the classes used elements of critical race theory, which he complained about in a letter he wrote to the district board in 2021 before becoming a member. In the letter, Cook acknowledges critical race theory as a legal concept “that seeks to transform the relationship among race, racism, and power.” However, he also claimed that a major part of its framework is being told from the perspective of someone of color detailing their personal experiences about systemic oppression.
“A strong theme in the curriculum materials is the idea of a dominant culture. This could be Western civilization, Christianity, Europeans, heterosexuals, men (patriarchy), white men, etc,” Cook wrote.
Cook said he did not want “any courses using CRT as an underlying theme in the material.”
He said he raised his concerns about the Black courses on Dec. 20 with president Bertrand, who decided to add the question of the classes to the district’s next meeting.
“The item was added to the agenda at 5:03 p.m. on December 20. (Our meeting started at 6:30 p.m. on December 21),” Cook said. “I had my doubts as to whether the academic department could re-write both curricula prior to fall 2024 classes begin; therefore, I thought it was appropriate to rescind approval in December so that students did not sign up for a class that they would not be able to take. (Class enrollment for fall 2024 started in January 2024)… As it turns out, the academic department has now made it a priority to present a new curriculum for both classes to the board prior to fall of 2024 and is allowing students to enroll (with the expectation that both curricula will be approved by the board).”
Students and teachers led a protest for inclusivity on Jan. 3, after the board president and superintendent announced the classes would be amended, according to St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“I don’t necessarily think they’re going to put the courses back… I think something’s going to come up,” Chance told The Daily Beast. “The whole politically neutral [thing], I feel it’s just going to be a watered-down version of Black history, and I think it’s going to be kind of a whitewashed version… like [how] Florida schools said slavery was good for the slaves… I feel that that is what the [Francis Howell] school board is going to try to do.”
Chance said she had already taken the Black history class and was planning to take the course on Black literature during her senior year. But the board’s decision to boot the classes went into effect at the start of the second semester after winter break.
“I took one course, but I was not able to take the other course because they got rid of it,” Chance said.
Isabella Duncan, a biracial junior at Francis Howell Central, told The Daily Beast that she had just finished her semester in Black history and loved it.
“It was such an amazing class. It’s so educational,” she explained. “I think everyone in that class has learned a lot of things that we never knew before because it was never taught. And so when I hear ‘politically neutral,’ all I hear is that they’re removing things that have really happened in history to make it seem more desensitized than it is now.”
She theorized the classes were considered political because of their ability to empower Black people.
“I think a lot of people can find that offensive and put that in a political way of mind,” she said. “I can’t see what any other problem would be about it. It’s an educational class. It’s like any other history class. You’re learning genuine things that happened, and I can’t see any other problem with it besides… people finally being educated about things that happened.”
Chance said it’s important to get various perspectives while learning social sciences, and board members were probably offended because they felt “it’s a direct target against them when it’s not.”
“It just gave us a different viewpoint and way of thinking, which I thought was really cool because we were learning in so many different ways,” she said. “I’ve never heard any students criticize the course.”
Fleming, a Black mother of children in Francis Howell School District, former teacher, and founder of Missouri Equity Education Partnership, said in an interview with The Daily Beast that the school board’s goal to create a “politically neutral” curriculum is impossible.
“There’s no part of African American history and literature that you can teach from a politically neutral standpoint,” she said, “in a country that has politicized every aspect of our lives.”
Fleming explained that the only way to teach about the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, an early American poetess who was enslaved and stolen from Senegal, is to also provide context about racism during the 17th century and how American politicians didn’t think it was possible for Black people to write as eloquently as Wheatley could. (In fact, Wheatley was put on trial in Boston because she was accused of plagiarism.)
Fleming also detailed how the artistic and culture movement known as the Harlem Renaissance was birthed after the Red Summer of 1919 when race massacres were happening across the U.S. following the return of soldiers from World War I.
“It won’t be Black history. It will be white history about Black events.”
Fleming, who’s originally from Tennessee, said that while her parents were kids, Black teachers were not allowed to educate white students.
“It would have been against the law for me to teach white children,” she said. “So, then to sit and say you’re going to teach about what my parents experienced in Tennessee, growing up, from a ‘politically neutral’ perspective as if it hasn’t always been about politics, that was an insult. It was an insult to me. It was an insult to my experience. It was an insult to everything that I hope for my children. Their future too.”
Opponents of the school board’s agenda against the Black studies courses have another protest planned for Jan. 18—just after Martin Luther King Jr. day and ahead of the district’s next board meeting.
Students and allies say they’re going to keep the momentum going so that the community stays informed.
“I just don’t think they want people to know the history,” Chance told The Daily Beast. “It’s just because of racism, they just don’t want to learn about the history. I think, if we talk about Black history and we teach Black history and people learn about it, then it starts to take away from white supremacy. And I think people have a huge issue with that.”
Fleming also said that she was going to continue the fight—regardless of the board’s decision to eliminate social justice.
“I think that one of the things that they’re going to realize is that the consequences of their action is to do exactly what they didn’t want,” she said. “They have now created a whole slew of activists who are going to be present and going to be watching what they do.”
“I want the board to know that students are not giving up and we will continue,” Chance vowed. “Until there’s justice and until they are fair and they take into consideration every student and every person part of the school district—whether it’s a parent, a staff member, a sibling, whatever—we’re not going to stop.”
