The Fayette County (KY) school district definitely has a lot of explaining to do, namely to the Kentucky Peace Officers Association. They heard some news regarding a test question on a 5th Grade exam where the question read, “What is the relationship between Breonna Taylor and Jacob Blake?” Now, the Kentucky Peace Officers Association is demanding an explanation for why this question was there in the first place.
If you don’t think that the question alone is a bit biased, then all you have to do is to look at the first choice in the list of possible answers. It reads, “Both of these individuals were victims of police brutality and violence, and that sparks nationwide protests against racial injustices.”
The Kentucky Peace Officers Association declined to do an on-camera interview with the news organization that broke the story, LEX 18. However, KPOA President Chip Nowlin did send in a statement:
“Yes, it is the responsibility of all educational leaders to appropriately mold the minds of young people and shape their futures, it definitely isn’t their right to do this in a manner that negatively influences them and promotes a political agenda.”
Fayette County Schools spokesperson Lisa Deffendall said that these questions had been taken out of context. They said that the questions were simply from an article taken from a website called Newsela, and that they didn’t have the faintest ill-intention behind them. They said that one of the main goals of the school is to help understudies become fully involved in their communities and that they have the ability to fully analyze whatever their general surroundings might bring.
However, KPOA continued to reprimand the Kentucky Department of Education. They made several counterarguments, including the fact that they thought that some of the proclamations on the KDE website were “incendiary and biased.”
President Nowlin went even further, pointing out that the KDE has recently been showing a clear pattern of insulting distributions to their schools regarding law enforcement. Indeed, they appear to be explicitly focusing on law enforcement agencies to the detriment of anything else.
Kentucky Department of Education representative Toni Konz Tatman made sure that the public knew that the KDE has already had a meeting with Nowlin where he outlined all of his concerns regarding this resource guide. She noted that KDE has always been dedicated to addressing systemic and race-related traumatic events with their faculty, staff, and students.
Unfortunately, Tatman and other KDE representatives said that they are still waiting for a response from the email they sent to Nowlin. They feel that he is simply seeing what he wants to see and just ignoring the problem, and just doing that is only going to exacerbate the situation and continue to create a “persistent negative impact.”
What should be done in this situation? Post your comments!
Pretty obvious – -this “department of indoctrination” needs to re-think their test questions BEFORE they are handed to students!