Wisconsin School District Received $1M for ‘Health Equity,’ ‘Social Emotional Learning’

A Wisconsin school district received a million bucks to promote woke social justice ideology to impressionable young minds.

A local notified Parents Defending Education (PDE) about a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) employee grant from the Greater Watertown Community Health Foundation to the Watertown Unified School District. The foundation prioritizes and promotes “health equity” in the local area. In woke Newspeak, “equity” is the opposite of the American value of equality, meaning rather that teachers weaponize discrimination and racial obsession to favor what they consider underprivileged groups. SEL is often tied to “social justice” and critical race theory initiatives, according to PDE. 

The health foundation that provided the cash for the school district brags, “Health equity will be at the center of our decisions, along with the voices of those with lived experience, as we target resources toward marginalized populations within our communities.” Notice the favoring of supposedly marginalized groups. 

The foundation emphasizes, “Equity begins internally, with our organizational policies and practices, and extends outward to our priorities, our partners, our investments, and our engagement with the community.” In other words, Marxist politics are their top priority. And they wanted to make it the top priority for the local school district as well.

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From the November PDE press release:

PDE submitted a public records request to the Watertown Unified School District seeking grants that the organization has provided as well as this employee’s contract with the school district. One grant that PDE received had a start date of September 1, 2022, and end date of June 20, 2023. This grant was for $100,000 “to implement WUSD Mental Health / SEL Coordinator.” Another grant that PDE received had a start date of April 1, 2023, and end date of June 20, 2025. The grant was for $100,000 also “to implement WUSD Mental Health / SEL Coordinator.”

Unfortunately, mental health, like the rest of the medical profession, is too often allied to damaging woke politics rather than to curing people. In this case, that certainly seems to be true.

The district additionally provided PDE with a 2024-2025 employee contract for Kenda Roman. The contract had a start date of August 26, 2024, for a term of nine and a half months. The base salary was $85,500 with a sign on bonus of $3,000. This bonus is “in exchange for agreeing to work for the District for at least consecutive two (2) years commencing with 2024-2025 school year.”

Roman had a “100 Day Plan” to implement SEL into students’ curriculum. According to PDE, the Greater Watertown Community Health Foundation has been providing the school district with numerous grants to the tune of tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece since 2017.

Does any of this really improve students’ education, or is it simply another way of brainwashing kids into focusing on leftist emotionalism and viewing everything through a Marxist lens? As noted above, SEL is too often tied to CRT and “social justice” initiatives, which is why it has been investigated and criticized over the last couple of years, including in reform-minded Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis phased it out of schools as much as possible. SEL is often a Trojan horse for CRT, patriots have warned.

Unfortunately, in Watertown, the horse is already within the walls and the brainwashing wokies have poured out of the belly of the beast to indoctrinate children. PDE is exposing the rot and now hopefully parents can challenge the Watertown school district and force reforms, such as Florida implemented.