(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) A school board director in Washington state linked the teaching of music to racism, causing the entire district to cancel music lessons.
Scott Clifthorne, acting director of the Olympia School District board, suggested that teaching elementary students to play instruments could “inculcate and allow white supremacy culture to continue to be propogated and cause significant institutional violence.”
According to the Daily Wire, the topic came up in a budgetary meeting. The board discussed ending the band and orchestra programs for fourth- and fifth-grade classes, a move that would save the district $530,000.
The board ended up cutting only the fourth-grade programming.
“We’re a school district that lives in … is entrenched in … is surrounded by white supremacy culture. And that’s a real thing,” Clifthorne explained in the public meeting.
“There’s nothing about strings or wind instrumental music that is intrinsically white supremacist,” he continued. “However, the ways in which it is and the ways in which all of our institutions, not just schools… inculcate and allow white supremacy culture to continue to be propagated and cause significant institutional violence are things that we have to think about carefully as a community.”
Parents who attended the meeting reamed out the board for their idiocy. One parent, Alesha Perkins, explained that the school’s issues lie elsewhere.
“This is actually par for the course. The issue is we are having such a catastrophic budget crisis right now that they’re having to cut programs,” she said.
“This program has been deemed ‘inequitable,'” Perkins explained. “And in a previous comment, the director of elementary education stated that not only is this program ‘inequitable,’ but when she heard the word ‘tradition of excellence,’ which is used to describe our music programs, she said that the word ‘tradition’ actually translated to her means ‘systemic discrimination.'”
Perkins also stressed the importance of strong leadership in the midst of historic enrollment losses.
“We are losing students in huge numbers…. I’m talking hundreds and hundreds of students that are exiting the district, and they are virtually all citing these reasons,” she explained. “You cannot sustain a school district with a mass exodus of students.”
