Members of the watchdog group Fair Education flooded Tuesday’s Santa Barbara Unified school board meeting, occupying more than half the room and accounting for nearly all the public comments. The taxpayer group fiercely opposes implicit-bias education — voluntary classes intended to heighten racial awareness among students — and is pursuing a lawsuit to expose what it calls discrimination against white, Christian, and conservative students.
Just last week, the group filed court declarations outlining specific instances of discrimination at the hands of Just Communities Central Coast, the nonprofit group that offers the implicit-bias trainings. The declarations were required to provide a basis for a lawsuit against Just Communities and the district. The original suit, filed in December, was thrown out on a technicality. Fair Education filed a new suit in April, which the district has since asked the courts to reject.
“My son gave a stirring presentation of what Just Communities has done; we call it ‘unjust communities,’” said Greg Hammel, a member of Fair Education who submitted one of the five declarations last week. “My son got punched because of his skin color. If he were black, you guys would have been running up a pole to CNN.