Trustees of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District, a public school system in Watsonville, Calif., near San Jose, voted unanimously on April 16 to renew a $90,000 contract with Community Responsive Education.
Community Responsive Education is a member of the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, according to an archived version of the coalition’s site. The latter hailed the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, as a “victory,” according to StandWithUs, whose executive director for the northern California region, Oleg Ivanov, told JNS that the contract renewal is “very troublesome.”
“Concerned members of the community, as well as local and national organizations that monitor K-12 antisemitism, such as StandWithUs, will certainly continue to follow the situation and be prepared to take necessary steps to ensure that taxpayer funding is not misused to pay for biased curriculum,” Ivanov said.
“Grants that were meant to fight hatred against Jews should never be used to pay consultants who have promoted antisemitism, anti-Israel narratives and other forms of bias,” Ivanov stated.
Community Responsive Education had a contract with the school district in 2021 and 2022, but the district terminated the agreement after the local Jewish community said that it was “promoting anti-Israel and antisemitic content in its curriculum,” Jewish Insider reported.
Some three-and-a-half hours into the district’s April 16 board meeting, Joy Flynn, a trustee, said that Jews are “historically” wealthy.
“It has been something that I’ve discovered, or that I’ve been a little bit taken aback by, is the lack of acknowledgment of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community, that the community, that of black and brown people don’t have,” Flynn said during the public meeting.
“While they have people power, there is that economic power that really does exist. There’s also the presentation power, the privilege that comes with presenting as white and that is real,” she said. “You can deny it or you can—so the thing that I ask people often is, what do you do with your privilege?”
“Schools should not be battlefields in any war, let alone one targeting the Jewish community, especially at a time when antisemitism is rising to crisis levels across California,” stated Carly Gammill, director of legal policy at StandWithUs.
“It is now the responsibility of Pajaro Valley Unified School District and California state agencies to ensure that the anti-Jewish sentiments of board members and their chosen contractor do not result in any form of bias or bigotry within the district,” she said.