Shoreline School District Reinforces its DEI Commitments

Bucking a growing trend to abandon the controversial and divisive initiative, Shoreline School District in Washington state has doubled down on “Anti-Racism” resolutions and ethnic studies encouraged

Shoreline Public School District in King County, Washington remains committed to the so-called diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) ideology it adopted in 2021 despite the enormous backlash nationwide against these initiatives. In fact, the Shoreline Public School District outright says in its “Race & Equity Policy” that “institutional racism exists within public school systems.” Some of the professional development goals of the district are to “train staff to use a race and equity decision making tool,” although it remains to be seen or explained just what that means. But the School Board makes clear its focus on holding the Superintendent accountable for developing such a plan while allocating resources for ongoing race and equity training for the staff. The question is: just who is creating these trainings and plans? Who is being consulted for this work? 

The Superintendent of Shoreline has championed the ethnic studies program with activist Tracey Castro-Gill. Castro-Gill, who claims on her X profile photo to be “pro-hoe,” has regularly accused Israel–falsely–of committing genocide, and has made excuses for Palestinian terrorism. Besides her wildly inappropriate content and use of alternative facts–neither of which are admirable for an educator around children–Castro-Gill has long been a controversial figure. Between 2019-20, Castro-Gill led the Seattle Public School District’s Ethnic Studies program, earning $93,000 annually in the position. However, the program was an absolute failure, leading to her firing. Under her tenure, the academic achievement of Seattle’s youth plummeted. According to The Daily Wire, “at one pilot school, John Muir Elementary, black achievement had been rising steadily every year, but all those gains and more were wiped out, with the black passing rate dropping from 28% to under 18% the next school year. At another pilot school, 69% white and with only seven black students, the white students’ pass rates also plunged, from 60% to 36%.” The position was dissolved soon after. She also accused colleagues of racism for disagreeing with her, and during her tenure introduced an “Ethnic Studies Math” program which claimed that ordinary mathematics courses were racist, and instead taught about “power and oppression.” Most controversially, Castro-Gill married a convicted child molester, even moving her own young daughter in with him, and, according to her own father, lied about her experience with child homelessness. 

Castro-Gill is not the only one promoting disturbing communist propaganda in Shoreline. The school district partnered with Castro-Gill’s WAESN organization—Washington Ethnic Studies Now. CAIR-WA has partnered with WAESN, particularly with an agenda on “teaching genocide” and including the war in Gaza as an example of this. WAESN came into existence with the help of Curtis Acosta and his organization, Acosta Educational Partnership. Among the AEP team is Samia Shoman, the coordinator of Middle East Children Alliance’s (MECA) Teach Palestine project. This project labels Zionism as “setter-colonial” and erases the Jewish indigenous history in the land, and promotes “resistance.” Then, there’s Orlando Carreon, an educator with UC Davis who instructs courses in Social Justice Education and Language Learning in K-12 contexts. For example, one of his research papers is entitled “Hope is the Thing with Metaphors: De-Situating Literacies and Learning in English Language Arts Classrooms.” Naturally, given the name, the paper critiques how literacy is measured, suggesting that measuring literacy in the English language (which is standard in English speaking countries) is exclusionary. One particular section says, “completeness and adherence to the requirements was the focus of all talk at all times, even though the required topic of the poems focused on students’ personal lives, with the potential for a more situated or student-centered approach to examining poetry. Knowledge in these activities was static and pre-established; catalog poems were lists written according to specific guidelines. Students could demonstrate mastery of this knowledge by reproducing linguistic structures and creating their own lists.”

Shoreline School District is just one example of school districts trying to find ways to skirt President Trump’s executive orders. The constant back-and-forth of Palo Alto School District on whether or not to teach Ethnic Studies is another one.  All of this displays just how hard it is to undo activism that pretends to be a form of education. But more importantly, it’s part of a disturbing trend of “resistance” to the will of parents who do not want discriminatory DEI initiatives in their children’s classrooms. Unfortunately, some school districts will keep trying to prioritize Marxist political agendas over the well-being of students or educational achievement.