Indoctrination task force targets these successful Boise school district programs. Why?
As the principal and assistant principal of Fairmont Junior High in Boise in 2006, we implemented a program called AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) to encourage more of our students, the majority of whom came from economically disadvantaged homes and other difficult circumstances, to prepare to go to college.
At that time AVID had already been successfully supporting college enrollment among socio-economic and ethnic/racial groups underrepresented in colleges for 25 years with the data to prove it.
This comprehensive elective program teaches students the academic, organizational and study skills they need to become college-ready and connects them with an instructor, a cohort of other students and tutors who will support them throughout their journeys.
AVID also trains teachers to increase the rigor of their courses and to implement the most effective instructional strategies available, which benefits the entire school. The demographics of students in AVID must mirror those of the overall school, so students from all of the diverse economic and ethnic groups at Fairmont were represented.
Thanks to our staff and district support, our first group of eighth-graders began their transformation from underachieving students, unsure of their futures, to proficient and confident students, who would proudly inform anyone who would listen, “I’m going to college.”
When they graduated from Capital High four years later with 70% of them going to college, we wept with joy.
And that was only the beginning.
Since then, thousands of students in the Boise district and other districts around the state have gone to college because of AVID.
While the overall go-on rate in Idaho is under 45%, it exceeds 70% for AVID students in the Boise District.
Our English Language Learner (ELL) program also brought success to our students.
For two years, we housed the language academy for new arrivals.
Our students were Iraqis whose parents had translated for the Americans during the war, they were Russians whose parents had been persecuted in their homeland for practicing their charismatic Christian faith, they were Central Americans whose parents had been driven from their homes by cartels that supplied illegal drugs to the United States, and they were children whose parents from many different lands had suffered violence and indignity at the hands of abusive leaders.
Our students and staff welcomed and supported them as they worked hard to learn English and develop the academic and social skills that would allow them to thrive as new Americans. We loved hearing them adopt the slang of their native-language friends and seeing them run around the gym at school dances just like all of the other seventh-graders.
When we read that Idaho’s indoctrination task force was targeting the AVID and ELL programs for investigation, we scratched our heads.
Why would anyone be apprehensive of programs that brought so much success to students? The task force can’t even define critical race theory, or indoctrination for that matter, so what did it hope to find? And why were these two programs specifically targeted?
Unfortunately, we suspect that our students’ success is exactly what the task force is afraid of. Do they want to end programs that support the success of children whom they fear will “replace them”?
If the goal of the task force is to stop teaching students that some people experience discrimination, ironically it is only confirming discrimination.
Our AVID and ELL students have now learned that their leaders in Idaho are suspicious of them, want to invalidate their accomplishments and remove the mechanisms that contributed to their success.
No textbook or lesson plan could present a better example of discrimination. Perhaps the task force should investigate itself.
Dr. Stacie Curry and Amy Kohlmeier are both former principals and area directors of the Boise School District. They have both retired.
