Two educators in Springfield, Missouri are suing the school district for violating their First Amendment rights by requiring them to participate in critical race theory training.
The Southeastern Legal Foundation filed the lawsuit on their behalf, Just the News reports.
“Last year, the school district there required all of its employees – so anyone down from a bus driver driving the kids to school, all the way up to an AP history teacher, actually teaching them in the classroom – required them to do what they called an equity and anti-racist training,” Southeastern Legal Foundation counsel Kimberly Hermann told the John Solomon Reports podcast.
The training told educators to become “anti-racist educators” and commit to “equity.”
Hermann argued the training violated the First Amendment rights of educators by “compelling the teachers, and the educators in these trainings, to agree with the doctrines that they know are illegal…they’re then being asked to go into the classroom and violate the students’ equal protection rights.”
Educators were given documents to take into the classroom that teach them to “place each child on an oppression matrix” and to put themselves on an “oppression matrix and identify that you are a white supremacist because, say, maybe you voted for Donald Trump,” Hermann explained. “Or maybe because if you are a victim of a crime, and possibly the person committing that crime is a person of color and you call the police, you are then a white supremacist.”
The training also encouraged the educators to “vote for socialist candidates.”
