Documents obtained by the Center for American Liberty and reviewed by The Federalist reveal that one of California’s largest school districts paid the education consulting group Powerful Choices almost $600,000 for training on “equity” and “anti-racism” between 2021 and 2024.
Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) hired Powerful Choices to conduct virtual, “anti-racist” professional development sessions to enable staff, faculty, and PUSD leaders to “respect and support students in a relationally responsive manner and address academic achievement accordingly.” The school district also brought in a professor from the University of Southern California to test an experimental “Proud & Empowered” intervention for LGBT-identifying students at the school.
Meanwhile, the majority of students at PUSD schools fail to achieve proficiency in basic skills like reading and mathematics.
“Spending $600,000 [on] D.E.I. and LGBT activist training while failing to educate African American and Hispanic students is top shelf gaslighting,” said Center for American Liberty CEO Mark Trammell in a statement to The Federalist. “Proficiency numbers out of Pasadena USD are terrible. Parents deserve to know why basic education is being sacrificed for ideological indoctrination.”
America’s public schools have weaponized critical race theory and gender ideology to indoctrinate and groom children without parents’ knowledge for years, especially in Democrat-run states like California. President Trump’s Department of Education has taken steps to end this by cutting funding for social justice teacher training.
Emails obtained by the Center for American Liberty reveal that PUSD teachers were uncomfortable with aspects of the “anti-racist” training, which was apparently segregated in some instances. After members of a white affinity group from two schools participated in joint training that included what was described as a “tough session” in 2022, Powerful Choices decided to discontinue its practice of moving teachers into break-out groups based on their skin color, at least for those schools.
“We heard you loud and clear that asking you to move into racial identity affinity groups felt like a breach of trust for many,” Powerful Choices wrote in an email to the teachers. The organization considered bringing in a “restorative justice expert” after the session, but ultimately decided against it.
Included in the source list for the anti-racism training reviewed by The Federalist are books like White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.
PUSD spent $180,350 in the 2021-2022 school year, $189,100 in the 2022-2023 school year, and $201,600 in the 2023-2024 school year for Powerful Choices services, PUSD purchase orders show.
From 2021 to 2023, Powerful Choices ran a customized two-year pilot program for a limited number of schools: Altadena Elementary School, Eliot Middle School, Sierra Madre Elementary School, John Muir High School, Pasadena High School, Webster Elementary School, and Willard Elementary School. Slated to join the program in 2023-2024 were Blair High School, Center for Independent Study, Field Elementary School, Longfellow Elementary School, Madison Elementary School, Marshall Fundamental, PALS, Rose City High School, and San Rafael Elementary. Apparently, PUSD leadership, school psychologists, and school counselors were not included in the pilot program, but were added to later training sessions.
Emails obtained by the Center for American Liberty show that the school district also brought in Jeremy Goldbach from the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work to test a “Proud & Empowered intervention” funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the 2019-2020 school year. P&E’s goal was to address “coping skills, disparities in victimization, and behavioral health outcomes” for LGBT-identifying students. The intervention was apparently implemented in four schools from the district.
As part of the program, the schools conducted two school-wide surveys: one about bullying and the cultural climate surrounding trans-identifying students in the schools and another to identify “popular opinion leaders” among the student body to act as allies for the LGBT-identifying students, according to email communications.
When a parent reportedly expressed frustration about the way the bullying survey, which allegedly had questions very similar to the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS), was administered, the staff expressed confusion about why the survey was such a big deal, emails show. The CHKS asks students questions about their sexual orientation, sexual experience, body image, gang involvement, and drug use, among other things.
A slide show from staff training titled “Supporting LGBTQ+ Youth in Crisis” details how to inquire about a child’s sexual identity and how to assess for suicidality. The slides attribute the suicide risk to bullying and marginalization, ignoring the links between trauma in trans-identifying youth and childhood abuse. The intervention itself was part of a research study.
PUSD did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.