Officials in several Idaho school districts were caught in an undercover video discussing different ways to bypass the state’s ban on teaching critical race theory in public schools.
The video was released Wednesday by the organization Accuracy in Media and features Idaho school officials explaining how they bypassed the state’s ban on critical race theory and social-emotional learning by teaching the same concepts under a different name.
“Social-emotional learning, we can’t say that here anymore. It’s mental health,” Cindy Dion, a district instructional coach for the Nampa school district in northern Idaho, said in the undercover video.
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Social-emotional learning, which purports to teach students to be more empathetic and understanding of people from different social and cultural backgrounds, has been criticized by parent activists as a Trojan horse for critical race theory.
“It’s just our mental health curriculum,” Dion said in the video again, referring to social-emotional learning. “We’re just learning how to worm around all those weird things that are out there.”
Melissa Langan, the chief academic officer for Caldwell School District in Idaho, was caught on video explaining how the district had intentionally renamed social-emotional learning to “behavior adaptations.”
“It’s kind of a bummer that we have to do that,” Langan said. “But at the same time, it was kind of brilliant … because they don’t care about [behavior adaptions], even though its the same thing as [social-emotional learning].”
Last year, Idaho was among the first states to pass legislation banning critical race theory in the state’s public schools. The controversial theory claims that American institutions and culture are systemically racist and oppressive to racial minorities.
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The theory has taken different forms when implemented in public school instruction, but usually only incorporates aspects of the theory in various subjects. Various teacher training programs have also included instructions on how to integrate the theory into classroom instruction.
