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Jul 29, 2023

Francis Howell School Board set to rescind anti

Hundreds participate in a Black Lives Matter march and rally along Mid Rivers Mall Drive on Tuesday, June 16, 2020, sponsored by educators with the Francis Howell School District. ST. CHARLES COUNTY —

Hundreds participate in a Black Lives Matter march and rally along Mid Rivers Mall Drive on Tuesday, June 16, 2020, sponsored by educators with the Francis Howell School District.

ST. CHARLES COUNTY — The new conservative majority on the Francis Howell School Board is poised to cancel a resolution against racism passed three years ago amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.

The resolution, which is displayed in school buildings, calls racism “a crisis that negatively impacts our students, our families, our community, and our staff.”

“We will promote racial healing, especially for our Black and brown students and families. We will no longer be silent. We are committed to creating an equitable and anti-racist system that honors and elevates all, but one that also specifically acknowledges the challenges faced by our Black and brown students and families.”

Residents pause to watch as hundreds participate in a Black Lives Matter march and rally along Mid Rivers Mall Drive on Tuesday, June 16, 2020, sponsored by educators with the Francis Howell School District. Organizers called on attendees, made up of students and family members, to do more than react to racism, but to be proactive to seek it out and work against it.

At its meeting Thursday, the board will vote on automatically rescinding resolutions 75 days after “a majority of current Board of Education members were not signatories to the resolution or did not otherwise vote to adopt the resolution” and removing them from school buildings and publications.

With exceptions for legally binding and celebratory resolutions, the proposed policy states “resolutions are a reflection on a moment in time — specifically, the time the resolution was adopted — and resolutions shall not be used as a rationale for decisions within the District or act in any way to obligate the District to take a specific course of action.”

Other resolutions that would sunset under the policy include one from last year urging Missouri legislators to reject a bill from state Sen. Bill Eigel, R-Weldon Spring, to phase out or eliminate personal property taxes, and another from 2017 urging legislators to reject statewide charter school expansion.

The president of the St. Charles County branch of the NAACP believes the proposed policy specifically targets the anti-racism resolution, which is the only one displayed in schools.

“It is absolutely going backwards especially when you have a constant reporting of discriminatory things that are continuing to go on,” said Zebrina Looney of the NAACP. “It’s not acknowledging the students and what they’ve gone through. Personally, I grew up out here and to me this feels like a flashback in time, like a bad dream.”

Less than 7% of Francis Howell’s 16,500 students are Black. The district has a history of racial tension, most notably in 2013 when thousands protested the arrival of Black transfer students from unaccredited Normandy schools.

A recent school district investigation of a civil rights complaint involving a Black student found violations of the district’s policy against discrimination, harassment and retaliation, Francis Howell compliance officer Will Vanderpool wrote in a letter to the family in July.

The resolution in response to racism and discrimination, signed in August 2020, hangs on the wall at Francis Howell North High School on July 19, 2023. Photo courtesy Francis Howell School District.

The school district’s anti-racism resolution was passed in August 2020, two months after 2,000 protesters marched 3 miles down Mid Rivers Mall Drive in support of Black students following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The protesters called for changes to Francis Howell’s curriculum, hiring practices and discipline policies they said discriminated against people of color.

Only two current board members, Janet Stiglich and Chad Lange, were serving when the the anti-racism resolution was approved in 2020. After the proposed policy to rescind the resolution was introduced at the June school board meeting, Lange said that he’s voted on only three or four resolutions in his eight years on the board. To make any one “disappear like it never existed without discussion doesn’t sit well with me,” he said.

The other five current board members were elected in April 2022 and April 2023 with the support of the Republican-backed political action committee Francis Howell Families.

In 2021, the committee described the anti-racism resolution as “woke activism” and drafted an alternative “against all acts of racial discrimination, including the act of promoting tenets of the racially-divisive Critical Race Theory, labels of white privilege, enforced equity of outcomes, identity politics, intersectionalism, and Marxism ... the Board hereby declares its commitment to establishing, supporting, and sustaining a culture of racial harmony and goodwill districtwide.”

The policy to rescind prior board resolutions is sponsored by vice president Randy Cook, who was elected in 2022. Prior to the election, Cook wrote a letter to the school board that said he believed the anti-racism resolution was considered by some district staff “to be a mandate to implement sweeping ideological changes within the curriculum” including critical race theory.

Meanwhile, families continue to report racist incidents in the school district. The Rev. B.T. Rice, a local civil rights leader, said his granddaughter was repeatedly called the N-word and other racist slurs over the last three years while attending a Francis Howell middle school.

“We feel like to remove that resolution is a step backward as far as racial relations are concerned,” Rice said. “It seems Francis Howell has not been sensitive to what we think the African American community or the African American children are experiencing.”

Last spring, the district acknowledged “multiple incidents involving race” in a letter sent to Black families and said they would host small group conversations with Black students in May to “help inform our efforts to create a more inclusive and equitable school community.” The discussions “re-traumatized” students and racist slurs were written on whiteboards, Rice said.

Hundreds participate in a march and rally supporting Black Lives Matter along Mid Rivers Mall Drive on Tuesday, June 16, 2020, sponsored by educators with the Francis Howell School District. Organizers called on attendees, made up of students and family members, to do more than react to racism, but to be proactive to seek it out and work against it. Video by Christian Gooden, [email protected]

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The all-white school board has flipped to a conservative majority since passing the nonbinding resolution.

The anti-racism resolution will be taken down from school hallways in the St. Charles County district.