Woke Washington State School District Board Member Draws Fire for Cutting Music Program With Claim It Fosters ‘White Supremacy’ and ‘Institutional Violence’

An Olympia School District board member in Washington state is the recipient of intense criticism for attempting to justify budget cuts by eliminating the district’s music classes with the claims the classes promote “white supremacy culture” and “significant institutional violence.”

According to Jason Rantz, host of The Jason Rantz Show on 770KTTH, with an expected district budget shortfall of $11.5 million, School Board Director Scott Clifthorne told parents the music program for fourth and fifth-grade students would be eliminated to make the budget cuts.

However, parents of students in those grades grew angry, wrote Rantz at MyNorthwest Tuesday.

“In the end, the district cut band and strings from 4th-grade classes for a savings of roughly $537,000,” he noted, and then added, “But the cuts were not considered solely over budgetary concerns.”

Clifthorne (pictured above) proceeded to tell the parents that music classes are not offered in an equitable manner across the district, with some schools offering the classes at times, some students would be forced to miss “core instruction.”

“Rather than address this reasonable concern,” Rantz explained, Clifthorne “launched into a monologue to claim music classes are examples of ‘white supremacy’ culture.”

The school board director claimed:

We also know that there are other folks in the community that experience things like a tradition of excellence as exclusionary. And I don’t think that there are just one or two or 10 or 20 people that think that. But that’s not unique to elementary instrumental music. We’re a school district that lives in … is entrenched in … is surrounded by white supremacy culture. And that’s a real thing.

Rantz noted that while Clifthorne claimed string and instrumental music is not “intrinsically white supremacist,” he followed that statement up immediately with another that said it is, actually, “white supremacist”:

There’s nothing about strings or wind instrumental music that is intrinsically white supremacist. However, the ways in which it is and the ways in which all of our institutions, not just schools — local government, state government, churches, or neighborhoods — 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. And I think that we have to do that interrogation. And we have to address the ways in which it creates challenges for administering the educational day for our elementary learners while we retain the program.

Like many city government school systems, the Olympia School District “is seeing dwindling enrollment,” Rantz explained. “They don’t realize it’s comments like that from Clifthorne that are responsible. This district has decided to lean unapologetically into woke culture that indoctrinates kids with far-left worldviews, rather than teach them basics.”

Alesha Perkins, a parent of three children in the district, told Fox & Friends First on Tuesday “a level of absurdity” has been reached in the district “among our school board and our leadership.”

“The issue is that we have such a catastrophic budget crisis right now that they’re having to cut programs,” Perkins explained. “And so what has happened is this program has been deemed inequitable, and in a previous comment, the director of elementary education stated that not only is the program inequitable, but when she heard the words ‘tradition of excellence,’ which was used to describe our music programs, she said that the word ‘tradition’ actually translated to her to mean systemic discrimination.”

Asked how this Critical Race Theory (CRT) worldview is affecting children in the district, Perkins said:

Well, what this is doing is it’s causing a lot of division and a lot of damage. It sounds nuts to probably a lot of people, but we’re actually living through it here. And as a result of all of this and these policies, that are being implemented, we are losing students in huge numbers. I’m not talking about a handful of students. I’m talking hundreds and hundreds of students that are exiting the district, and they are virtually all citing these reasons. You cannot sustain a school district with a mass exodus of students. I mean, it’s just not sustainable for funding or anything else.

Rantz noted this school board has a history of pressing its CRT agenda.

In October, the board appointed “radical Black Lives Matter activist” Talauna Reed to fill a vacant seat on the board:

Talauna Reed is known for railing against cops in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. She declared, “f*** the police” at a July 2021 rally in Olympia. She called nearby officers “pigs” and encouraged rallygoers to “tear s*** up” because only then will people pay attention to their cause. The Board ignored concerned parents who warned against the appointment.

The talk show host pointed out as well that, in February, Centennial Elementary School in Olympia created a fifth-grade BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) student group that excluded white students, as admitted by the school principal, Shannon Ritter, who also said she had hoped to create a second group for student “allies” of the BIPOC students.

Attorney Mark Lamb of Carney Badley Spellman, P.S., told the Jason Rantz Show the fact that an exclusionary BIPOC group occurred in an elementary school makes this discrimination highly questionable:

The age of the students, coupled with the principal’s email re: this “club”, makes it apparent that this is not a primarily student-led decision but rather one being generated and defended by the school itself. She [Ritter] describes it as being in the “early planning stages” which does not suggest 9-10 year olds are driving the program. The school district is committing in writing to enforce a race-based exclusion. No promise of a potentially forthcoming “ally” club can justify this.

The district, however, finally released a statement acknowledging it cannot segregate clubs according to race but defended its BIPOC club as necessary since fifth-grade students lead discussions on racial identity.

“Like other districts, including Seattle and Bellevue, Olympia is suffering the consequences,” Rantz concluded. “They could drop their equity agenda — a term they redefined for political goals — and focus on English, math, history, and arts. Instead, they seem hell-bent on continuing to pursue a political agenda. They don’t seem to mind that it hurts kids and the music teachers. They are the latest victims of the woke radicals.”

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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected]