At a time when many companies and organizations were walking back their commitment to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda or shutting down DEI departments altogether, the Biden Administration was doubling down. In fact, Biden’s Education Department funneled more than $1 billion in DEI grants over four years to approximately 300 K-12 school districts in at least 42 states. This impacted nearly 6.8 million students. The grassroots organization Parents Defending Education exposed this data in December after a long investigation and analysis of Education Department grant funding.
Parents Defending Education’s president and founder, Nicole Neily, told the Washington Examiner: “To say that the Biden Administration spent money on DEI programs like drunken sailors is an insult to sailors.” She added that, as a result of the DOE’s fiscal irresponsibility, “the American people are now dealing with the after-effects of out-of-control inflation — and to add insult to injury, these programs completely failed to improve student outcomes … Any federal bureaucrat who approved these grants should be frog-marched out of the Department on Day One” [of the new Trump Administration].”
Some of these grants went to institutions you might expect to see on a list like this, such as the University of California. However, some of the outlandish spending hits closer to home. In Missouri, Phyllis Schlafly’s home state, the curators of the University of Missouri St. Louis campus were awarded $306,289 in federal grants to provide 64 mental health services interns. These interns were to serve at 13 “high needs schools” to provide so-called Trauma-Informed, Antiracist Social-Emotional Learning (TIAR-SEL) in order to address the mental health needs of more than 5,000 students in the Riverview Gardens School District in St. Louis.
If Trauma-Informed, Antiracist Social-Emotional Learning sounds patently ridiculous to you, I’m sure you are gladly celebrating the new Trump Administration. With just a few weeks under his belt, we have already seen that President Trump is committed to majorly reforming these bloated federal agencies if not eliminating them altogether.
For more: Exposed: Biden’s Reckless Spending on K-12 DEI, Education Reporter
This post originally appeared at https://www.phyllisschlafly.com/family/exposed-bidens-reckless-spending-on-k-12-dei/
Phyllis Schlafly