Seattle schools are teaching 7-year-olds that police are racist

A video was posted by a second grade teacher from the Grove Elementary school in Marysville, that's called "Animation Series: Something Happened In Our Town." Parents were instructed to watch the video with their children, and then the students—7-year-olds—were supposed to participate in a virtual classroom discussion about it. The book is a discussion of racist policing, from the perspectives of a white family and black family, respectively.

The video, produced by Niagara Falls Underground Railroad Heritage Center program and Atlantis School For Gifted Youngsters, is a dramatic reading of a book of the same name by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazzard.

The book is about the police shooting of a man in the white family's town. Emma, a little girl, hears about a shooting in her town, and while her parents tell her it was a mistake, her sister says that it wasn't an accident, but that the police shot the man because he was black.

Journalist Jason Rantz reached out to the school, and the Director of Communications, Engagement and Outreach, Jodi Runyon, got back to him via email. Runyon said that the video "was successfully addressed at the school level," but declined to comment further.

It was after two parents complained, Rantz reported, that the video was addressed by the school, and pulled from the second-grader's lessons.

Rantz followed up with Runyon, who had not adequately answered his questions. She said "I was brief in my response because there really isn't a story here, essentially its a non-story." She noted that "there was no further discussion as the teacher addressed the parent's concerns appropriately."

Runyan said that the video was actually "an optional resource to build understanding in challenging times." She also stated that the teacher held no "ill-intent," and that the video was sourced near the end of the spring term, when educators were trying to figure out how to handle the pandemic as well as address social-justice concerns in the wake of George Floyd's death.

Rantz reports that Grove Elementary isn't the only Seattle-area school to embark on this course of indoctrination. Gig Harbor's Discovery Elementary featured an online resource for second-graders to explore BLM, environmental justice, and other social justice-inspired ideological course material.

Washington state is one of many that has been experiencing this deluge of critical indoctrination. New York, Texas, and Illinois are only a few of the states that are also pushing these kinds of ideas in the classroom, either from the schools administrative level or simply from classroom teachers themselves. The Milwaukee school district, among others, has even paired with Black Lives Matter to create curriculum.