In Naperville, Illinois, School district 203 paid a “diversity consultant” Dena Nicole Simmons (read: Social Justice Indoctrination Expert) $10,500 for a one-hour “keynote address” on Zoom (Thousands of creators do this on YouTube for free. Now That’s a hustle.) at an event called the “2021 Equity Institute” on February 28th. What was included in this incredibly expensive and ‘surely’ very ‘valuable’ lecture you ask? Let’s break it down with some quotes.
Bashing “Whiteness” in Illinois Schools
First according to The Federalist who sourced a whistleblower,
“Simmons told attendees “our education is based on a foundation of whiteness” and that Americans are “spiritually murdering” students. In addition, parroting the refrain of the “anti-racist” movement, Simmons told attendees that if they were not an “anti-racist,” they were racist.”
A FOIA request from the School district yielded documents that described the “keynote” and it read like social-justice, critical race theory word salad.
Asra Q. Nomani, wrote that the project manager for learning services at the school district Colleen “Cannon-Ruffo outlined a description for the session, “Surviving to Thriving,” loaded with amorphous language, bordering on gibberish:
For community members to thrive, they must feel safe to be who they are; they must love themselves. As a result, our leadership, instruction, and assessment must foster psychological and emotional safety through emotional intelligence, culturally responsivity, and anti-racist practices. During this interactive session, participants will explore impostor syndrome, emotional intelligence, and culturally relevant pedagogy, and anti-racist practices. Through narrative, Dr. Simmons will discuss how the intersection of emotionally intelligent and culturally relevant practices can create equitable and welcoming communities, where everyone can learn in the comfort of their skin.”
Days later Simmons tweeted the following:
“If we laud SEL for how it supports youth w career, business, & economic success, we must also reckon w our blind obsession with capitalism & its relationship w the white supremacy upon which it was built.” Peep my @ASCD piece & subscribe: https://t.co/QDoNoiLXWl @LiberatED_SEL
— Dena Simmons (@DenaSimmons) March 2, 2021
Social Justice Talking points at Highly Inflated Prices
As Todd Starnes pointed out “One Illinois school district paid diversity consultant Dena Simmons a rate of $175 per minute to lecture on whiteness”. It simply takes your breath away that peddling this manner of badly informed, hyper-partisan, victim mentality reinforcing drivel is worth over $10k per hour. When so many Americans are unemployed due to insane COVID restrictions or driven out of work by the Biden-Harris regime’s sociopathic “environmental policies” our children are being deluded by hucksters and shills the likes of which would never be tolerated in academia let alone our public school classrooms. But in today’s world, parents are terrified to object so the money rolls in.
If there is any doubt as to what values the “Assistant director of the Yale Center of Emotional Intelligence.” Dena Simmons possesses and how compatible they are with American values check out the following she penned for inservice.ascd.org entitled “For Black educators when school systems aren’t doing enuf”. *(Yes, that is how a Yale Asst. Director spelled ‘enough’)
“I write these words a week after the Breonna Taylor verdict and two days after the first presidential debate, where I watched President Trump uphold white supremacy. I wish I could let these events slide off me, but they haunt, they nag, and they remind me yet again that Black lives do not matter. Other wounds of 2020 already fester—George Floyd’s public execution, Ahmaud Arbery’s last run, the disproportionate number of Black people impacted by COVID-19, and on and on.
Last week, a white man wrote me an email starting with, “I trust you are well.” I responded, “These days, I don’t think we can trust that anyone is well, especially Black women. I am not well. We are not well.”
Homeschooling is still looking better and better every day.
