In an appearance on Fox News last week, Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears said that Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) had spent some $300,000 teaching critical race theory, calling the expenditure “real money” and “going-to-jail money.”
WATCH:
PolitiFact, a website ostensibly created to verify political claims and hold the powerful accountable, responded to Sears’ statement, saying that no evidence exists that the Loudoun County School Board ever taught CRT. At the same time, the site acknowledged that the district spent $34,000 on equity training in 2020.
LCPS spokesman Wayde Byard also admitted to PolitiFact that the $34,000 seminar in question “was held to familiarize senior school officials with critical race theory.”
Content to say that Sears exaggerated the cost of the seminar, the fact-checking website rated her statement “Mostly False” and moved on.
End of story, right?
Not so fast.
As Hot Air reports:
First, it’s interesting that Wayde Byard, a spokesman for the school, admitted the money was spent to “familiarize” people with CRT. He plays it off as if this is no big deal even as most of the media has denied repeatedly that CRT was encroaching on schools. In any case, as Twitchy pointed out, Daily Caller reporter Chrissy Clark presented evidence that Loudoun County spent quite a bit more than $34,000.
.@PolitiFact is calling out @WinsomeSears for “falsely claiming” that LCPS paid “about $300,000” for critical race theory-inspired training.
Well, your humble Poynter alumni is here with receipts. And LCPS DID pay upwards of $300k for such traininghttps://t.co/67dfCjaORz pic.twitter.com/OXT78tRiHm
— Chrissy Clark (@chrissyclark_) January 25, 2022
That’s a bit hard to read, but what it shows is that between Sep. 2018 and June 2020, the school system made seven payments to the Equity Collaborative LLC. The last one of those was for $34,167, the exact amount cited by Politifact. But that wasn’t even the largest payment that year. In April of 2020, they paid the group, $68,333. And back in June of 2019 they apparently paid them $242,000 for something.
Adding all of this up, it comes to well over $300,000, although it’s fair to say that amount covers primarily 2019 and 2020. So if this is accurate then Winsome Earle-Sears was correct about the amount of spending but slightly off on the timeline. Still, Politifact might need to revise this fact check to show that her statement was mostly correct rather than mostly false.
In fact, The Washington Post published an article about this controversy last November. At the time, columnist Marc Thiessen wrote:
Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools, which were ground zero in the debate over the role of parents in their kids’ education, paid $314,000 for critical race theory coaching for its teachers from the Equity Collaborative — a consulting firm that turns critical race theory into practices for “building more equitable learning environments.” In its presentation “Introduction to Critical Race Theory” the Equity Collaborative instructs teachers that racism is “an inherent part of American civilization” and attacks “ideas of colorblindness, the neutrality of the law, incremental change, and equal opportunity for all” for maintaining “whites’ power and strongholds within society.” It also questions “the idea of meritocracy” which “allows the empowered … to feel ‘good’ and have a clear conscience” and concludes with a breakout session for teachers to discuss “How might you use CRT to identify and address systemic oppression in your school, district or organization?”