The Virginia teachers union encouraged educators across the state to push content similar to critical race theory despite Gov. Glenn Youngkin's ban on the material.
The Virginia Education Association (VEA) pushed a "Black Lives Matter at School toolkit" for the organization's annual "week of action" in February, encouraging its members to participate and offering the toolkit as a "resource guide for advancing racial justice in Virginia’s schools," according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
The toolkit provided to educators promotes 13 "guiding principles" of Black Lives Matter, including "working towards a queer-affirming network where heteronormative thinking no longer exists" and the "disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other."
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The material includes lesson plans produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education branch, with one lesson encouraging students to consider the "trans-affirming" BLM principle: "We are committed to being self-reflexive and doing the work required to dismantle cis-gender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence."
Some of the lessons encourage students to get involved in political activism and how they can become involved in the BLM movement or other causes. One research question asks sixth-graders how they will "liberate yourself and your oppressors."
The toolkit also offers advice to educators in districts where the superintendent refuses to support the "week in action," telling members to still "encourage educators to share the BLM toolkit with their school administrators, fellow educators, and school counselors."
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The news comes despite Youngkin winning the 2021 election largely on the back of promised education reforms. Upon taking office, the governor's first executive order directed the superintendent of public instruction end the use of "inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory."
"The Administration will not support a teacher's union attempts to prop up a politically driven curriculum toolkit which contains tenets that go beyond teaching history, lesson plans, and operates as a political manual for the next generation of Virginia's students," a spokesperson for the governor told Fox News Digital. "Virginia's schools will continue to teach all history - the good and the bad."
However, VEA President James Fedderman insisted that the toolkit was simply meant to inspire an ongoing movement of "critical reflection and honest conversation on issues of racial justice" in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.
"Some people, like Governor Youngkin, find this to be an objectional stance, but we are unapologetic in our support of this goal," Fedderman said. "As a union of public school educators, we seek nothing more than to present an accurate portrayal of America’s past, without which we will not make the progress we so desperately need to make as a nation."
