A proposal to add a ban on critical race theory (CRT) to the Frisco Independent School District’s (FISD) teaching policy was not advanced at the latest meeting of the district’s board of trustees.
On February 13, in a 5-2 vote, the board decided not to adopt the ban, with members of the majority arguing that the language of the proposal was overly broad and redundant in light of existing state law, according to Community Impact.
Texas’ anti-CRT law was enacted back in September 2021. It required that slavery and racism be framed as deviations from American principles in public school instruction and banned any instruction suggesting racial superiority or that inherent moral traits are a consequence of race.
Additionally, the law banned the 1619 Project from being used in curricula, while also adding historical documents written by people of color and women that had not previously been required content.
Still, the state law did not seem sufficient to two trustees at FISD’s recent board meeting.
According to district documents, the key provision of FISD’s proposed ban reads:
“The District, including its teachers and administrators, shall not … [t]each, instruct, advocate, promote, or discuss any ideas, beliefs, concepts, theories, principles, rules, thoughts, or impressions that have any connection to, relationship with, refer to, are influenced by, or are otherwise consistent with so-called CRT or SDI (systemic discrimination ideologies).”
The Dallas Express reached out to FISD Trustee Marvin Lowe, a proponent of the measure, and asked him what he thought about the criticism it received.
“Often when we try to plug holes in this kind of stuff, people end up doing things to get around it, so we tried to make the language kind of tight, so they couldn’t do anything related to CRT … or the country being founded in 1619, anything related to that,” said Lowe, referring to the 1619 Project, which has increasingly been making its way into curricula in different parts of the country.
The 1619 Project is a series of essays published by The New York Times that “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the United States’ national narrative.”
But some speakers during the public comment portion of the FISD Board of Trustees meeting claimed the rule was unnecessary because teachers were already afraid of touching on certain subjects pertaining to race that could fall into a proscribed category.
“Teachers are scared to intervene when biased incidents happen on their campus,” said Sherasa Thomas, speaking for the Collin County branch of the NAACP, according to The Dallas Morning News.
“They’re scared of what might happen to them, of losing their jobs when organic conversations come up in the classroom. They are unable to have these conversations with students out of fear,” she claimed.
Lowe denied that the measure would have outright prohibited teachers from discussing race or important topics like slavery and other aspects of U.S. history.
“We’ve had curriculums in the schools that talked about systematic racism, how it still exists … Are institutions racist? Can [black people] not go to restaurants? … I don’t see it, and I would prefer that we not teach that,” Lowe told The Dallas Express.
“We can talk about individual instances of racism … people are racist, it’s out there, okay, but just don’t take this big cloud, ‘oh there’s systematic racism in the United States,’ and that’s what we blame all the ills that the black population is going through on … That’s what I was trying to address,” said Lowe.