Virginia Supreme Court panel hears lawsuit alleging racist curriculum in Albemarle (2024)

A lawsuit claiming racism by the Albemarle County School Board for its approach to teaching racial inequality was heard by the Supreme Court of Virginia on Wednesday morning.

The suit was brought by five parents in Albemarle County in December 2021 in conjunction with the conservative nonprofit Alliance for Defending Freedom.

It says that Albemarle County’s curriculum and “anti-racism policy” violates the rights of parents and students, specifically by indoctrinating children with elements of “critical race theory.”

Albemarle School Board unanimously voted to adopt a detailed anti-racism policy in 2019. The policy introduced anti-racist teaching, which the school defines as confronting prejudice through lesson plans where students discuss past and present racism, stereotyping and discrimination in society.

The appeals court ruled that the families failed to prove constitutional injuries, meaning that the judges didn’t find that the parents’ or the students’ rights were actually infringed upon by the School Board’s policies or lesson plans.

A lawyer for the families, Vincent Wagner, asked the Supreme Court to overrule the lower court’s decisions.

“The School Board compels students to say they agree with its stereotyped viewpoints or risk being branded a racist by their own teachers, a label that can stick with a student for years,” said Wagner.

Judy Le, chair of the Albemarle County School Board, declined to comment on Wednesday morning’s argument, citing pending litigation concerns.

3 judges hear argument

The families are asking the Supreme Court to rule that Albemarle’s curriculum constitutes racial discrimination. It asks judges to issue an injunction from teaching similar types of anti-racist messages. And it asks the school district to pay for the families to find “alternative education” for their children.

Three Supreme Court judges — Chief Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn, Justice Thomas P. Mann and Justice Wesley G. Russell Jr. — heard Wagner’s argument.

Early in the hearing judges expressed skepticism with the legal standing at issue in the suit, explaining that the Virginia Constitution gives wide leeway to school districts to create their own curricula.

Wagner argued that the anti-racism lessons superseded those protections because teachers were being instructed to punish dissenting students.

“The school board’s conduct here violates the anti-discrimination clause in the constitution, and the free speech clause in the constitution, so that curricular authority is limited by those individual rights guarantees,” Wagner said.

Wagner’s argument was probed by Justice S. Bernard Goodwyn, who tasked him to explicitly point to where in Albemarle’s policy teachers were penalizing supposedly racist statements made by children. In one example, Wagner said a student could be penalized for advocating for a “color-blind society.”

“What makes you think they would label those statements as racist?” said Goodwyn. “They didn’t say that. You interpreted what they said, to say that.”

Wagner said that the lessons created a “racially hostile education environment.” He pointed the judges to an example lesson in which students had been divided into the dominant and subordinate groups.

Wagner said the white students were in the dominant group while students of other races were in the subordinate section.

“An activity like that harms students on both sides,” said Wagner.

The Supreme Court now has several weeks to deliberate on the case, with options including dismissing the case outright and allowing the case to be fully reheard before a full body of Supreme Court Justices, rather than a panel of three.

Failing in those efforts, the last court to which the plaintiffs can appeal is the United States Supreme Court.

Haas: ‘This is not going to be easy’

The Albemarle School Board’s policy was celebrated when it was announced in 2019. Superintendent Matthew Haas said that the school district was one of the first in the nation to implement an anti-racism agenda.

“Structural racism is a thread that has long been woven into the fabric of our nation,” said Haas in a taped address. “Just look across our country, at graduation rates, disparate participation in programs meant to benefit all students, racially disparate results on test scores.”

Haas said that these are all the results of structural racism in the American education system.

While optimistic, Haas warned that the effort might require “uncomfortable honesty” from participants.

“This is not going to be easy; it’s going to require sustained effort and passion for change,” Haas said.

In their complaint, the five plaintiffs argued those efforts have backfired.

“Defendants claim that they want to stand against racism,” the complaint reads. “But rather than eliminate racism from the School District, defendants have done the opposite.”