Michigan K-12 District Adopts Black Lives Matter Resolution Accusing Community of ‘Institutionalized Racism’

A school bus drives past demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd hold up placar
OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images

A Michigan school board has approved a Black Lives Matter resolution that states its community is “a primarily white school district” that “occurred as a result of endemic racist housing policies, restrictive covenants, and intentional urban planning that prevented people of color from even entering white spaces.”

The resolution of the Mona Shores Public Schools Board of Education, of Norton Shores, Michigan, that passed at the end of June, says the board’s resolution is “in response to … a nationwide movement” that “has arisen to assert that Black Lives Matter.”

“Mona Shores Public Schools seeks to address institutionalized racism in our schools and community,” the resolution continues, adding that “the killing of unarmed Black men and women has left young people searching for answers to incredibly complicated and infuriating questions.”

Gary Nelund, mayor of Norton Shores, said in a statement to Breitbart News he disagrees with the paragraph that the Mona Shores school district is primarily white due to “racist” policies, referring to it as “a blanket statement lacking any specific evidentiary examples of such policies in the City of Norton Shores.”

The mayor continued:

My city participates in numerous State and Federal housing programs and in my 10 years as Mayor, we have not received any sort of correspondence about discriminatory policies, covenants or planning documents. Our City Manager has worked for the City for 25 years and he cannot recall any such correspondence in his time at the City. I agree that such discriminatory policies have existed in other parts of the country but I do not see them in Norton Shores.

According to the school board, its resolution speaks of its commitment “to the emotional and physical safety of Black students”:

[O]ur schools and classrooms must be safe spaces for dialogue and support on the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement … challenging all of our students and colleagues to recognize the innate value of Black lives will help all of our students grow because all lives cannot matter until Black lives do.

The resolution continues the school district will use “restorative justice practices district-wide” that typically ban suspensions and encourage leniency toward black students for unacceptable behavior.

When California banned suspensions for black students and instituted, instead, restorative justice practices in September 2019, Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and chair of the board of directors of the Center for New Black Leadership, told Breitbart News the outcome of such policies is “depressingly predictable”:

Just as we’ve seen in every other school district that has reduced or banned student suspensions and expulsions in order to eliminate racial disparities in school discipline, violence and chaos in those schools will increase – substantially. The victims of such violence and chaos will be other minority students whose learning environment will be disrupted by the presence of students who should’ve been disciplined.

Kirsanow emphasized that without suspensions and expulsions acting as deterrents, “the behavior of disruptive students will get worse.”

The Mona Shores resolution also states the board will “expand the role and scope of the Culture and Diversity Committee” in order “to derail the school-to-prison pipeline, the broader historical experience of the Black community, and present schooling experience.”

The school board intends as well to alter curriculum to include “events in Black history and Black culture such as Jim Crow laws, segregation, the creation of jazz and hip-hop, Juneteenth, Tulsa Massacre, redlining and the failures of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the whitewashing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

Curriculum will also reflect “discussions of racial microaggressions” and “school-wide data on race and discipline.”

The school board says it is resolved to “continue to properly discipline students and faculty when they exhibit discriminatory or racist behavior, and maintain clearly delineated consequences of discriminatory and racist behavior such as mandatory anti-racism education.”

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