NCAE group 'countering parent complaints' to hold 3 listening sessions
Sessions target Alamance-Burlington schools, Guilford schools and Cabarrus schools
Organize 2020, the protest arm and social justice caucus of the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE), has announced its new affiliate called Honest Education Action & Leadership or H.E.A.L. NC will be holding three “summer listening sessions” on July 12, 13, and 14.
Organize 2020’s H.E.A.L. NC is apparently an affiliate of an initiative of “Race Forward,” an organization founded in 2017 that “catalyzes movement building for racial justice.” Race Forward was previously called the Applied Research Center, a progressive activist organization centered on civil rights and racial justice.
Three school districts were listed in the email with links to sign up for more information. Note that the link provided in the email for Cabarrus is actually labeled Guilford.
Alamance-Burlington Public Schools: July 12
Guilford Public Schools: July 13
Cabarrus Public Schools: July 14
The announcement was made via identical emails sent by Organize 2020, “Todd Warren Public School Parent,” and “Education Justice Alliance.”
The Organize 2020 email opens by calling parental concerns about their child’s education “manufactured outrage” and says parents are actually asking “When are we going to talk about what students, teachers, and schools really need instead of all these phony, made-up issues?”
The opening paragraphs also mention N.C. State School Board Member, James Ford, and Education Justice Alliance’s Letha Muhammed.
Oddly the email doesn’t mention Ford’s position on the state board of education, just his activism through CREED NC.
According to CREED NC’s about page, the organization “will reach beyond programming, and other facilitated experiences to promote deep and authentic engagement with some of the nation’s most pressing issues, such as equity, gender, race, class, civic engagement, mental health, community engagement, and social justice through education.”
Muhammed runs the Education Justice Alliance, an organization originally started to protest disproportionate suspension rates and the so-called “school to prison pipeline.”
The zoom calls referenced in the email likely include a Dec. 13 “CRT Town Hall” hosted by We Are (Working to Extend Anti-Racist Education) and attended by multiple elected officials in the Durham area.
Following the town hall, We Are’s Executive Director Ronda Taylor Bullock published a “post commentary” video in which she characterizes parental pushback on Critical Race Theory (CRT) as “gaslighting” and “fearmongering.”
Included in the listening session announcement email are more details about H.E.A.L NC, including that it is “anchored” by the Education Justice Alliance (EJA) and Downhome NC (DHNC).
As previously reported, EJA is a left-leaning activist group tied to the Blueprint NC network. The organization’s most recent activity includes recruiting children to assume activist roles as part of EJA’s “Youth Power Institute.”
Down Home NC (DHNC), which has a physical address in Burlington, North Carolina, appears to have a central purpose of “rural organizing” and "building power for working families in North Carolina." The left-leaning tracking website KeyWiki describes DHNC as a “rural North Carolina socialist organization.”