Anyone who doubts the message the Francis Howell School Board sent to the district's 16,500 students on Thursday should consider this: As a result of the all-white board's vote, a simple five-paragraph statement vowing that the overwhelmingly white district "will speak firmly against any racism," "promote racial healing" and "(acknowledge) the challenges faced by our Black and brown students and families" will now be systematically removed from school walls and purged from the district's published materials.

Think about that.

The board's right-wing majority can try to spin this putrid ideological stunt any way they like, but the indisputable fact is that the board has officially put itself on record as denying the undeniable fact of systemic racism. Period. What other conclusion can be drawn after the board's vote Thursday to revoke an anti-racism resolution that was adopted during America's racial reckoning in 2020?

Like many school districts around Missouri and the nation, Francis Howell for the past few years has been in the crossfire of a concerted campaign by right-wing activists to bring their culture war to the classroom.

The five board members who pushed through Thursday's 5-2 vote were elected since last April with support from the political action committee Francis Howell Families, a conservative activist organization. As the Post-Dispatch's Blythe Bernhard reports, the committee once offered its own version of an anti-racism proclamation — one that focused not on the actual problem of anti-Black racism in school systems, but on confronting the supposed scourges of "critical race theory," "identity politics" and (seriously) "Marxism."

Marxism isn't a historically relevant issue in the Francis Howell district. Racism is.

The St. Charles County district, one of Missouri's largest, has a student body that is less than 7% Black, and a history of racial tension. Thousands of parents protested the announcement in 2013 that students from the mostly Black Normandy School District would transfer to Francis Howell. More recently, an investigation of a civil rights complaint by a Black student concluded there had been violations of the district's anti-discrimination policy.

The majority in Thursday's board vote tried to obfuscate what they were doing — that is, erasing an anti-racism resolution — by presenting it as part of a broader new policy of automatically rescinding any resolutions that were passed under previous board majorities. That's not how public bodies work. This was an obvious move to rescind the anti-racism proclamation while pretending it was just some kind of parliamentary housecleaning.

In fact, the Francis Howell Families PAC that helped elect the new majority specifically condemned the anti-racism proclamation in 2021 as "woke activism." This was the majority's follow-up to get rid of it. That they didn't even have the courage to acknowledge what they were doing should add some shame to this already-shameful episode.

Public comments about the board's decision indicate there are many people within the school district who aren't happy about the board's action. But elections, as they say, have consequences.

Thursday's retrograde defense of racism was the direct consequence of district voters either actively or passively turning over their school board to ideological activists bent on transforming schools into culture-war battlefields. Future elections are the only way to undo that damage.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

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