U.S. News

Missouri School Board Backpedals After Cutting Black History Classes

REVERSING COURSE

The decision to remove the classes was met with fierce backlash and a petition from students.

Photo of a row of student lockers.
Kim Kulish/Getty

Last week, an all-white school board in Missouri voted to eliminate Black history and literature electives—months after the same conservative-led panel rescinded the district’s anti-racism resolution adopted after George Floyd’s murder. Now, after a backlash and petition from students, the Francis Howell School Board’s president and superintendent say the courses will return in the 2024-2025 school year, so long as the new curriculum is “rigorous and largely politically neutral,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports. The board’s right-leaning majority—elected with the help of a political action committee that opposes Critical Race Theory—said it cut the classes because they were taught through a “a social justice framework” developed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Students had requested the courses in 2020 amid complaints about discrimination against classmates and staff members of color.

Read it at St. Louis Post-Dispatch