By DONOVAN NEWKIRK | Fall 2020

After criticism from parents and other taxpayers, the Milwaukee Public School District will not be moving forward with its plan to incorporate the controversial Black Lives Matter at School curriculum district-wide this academic year.

But some individual MPS schools will be implementing at least some aspects of the curriculum as BLM supporters around the country continue to argue it should be used to formally shape the minds and views of young students.

MPS initially embraced the controversial organization. 

Just three days after the death of George Floyd on May 28 in Minneapolis, the MPS School Board passed a resolution to spend nearly $190,000 to develop and implement a curriculum centered around the Black Lives Matter movement. The resolution also called for hundreds of thousands of dollars more annually for the salaries and benefits for 12 ethnic studies teaching positions, five of them new.

At the same meeting, the board unanimously passed a resolution urging the district to “reduce the funding of contracts with the Milwaukee Police Department.”

“I certainly have received pushback from parents,” said Angela Harris, a first-grade teacher at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School in Milwaukee and chair of the Black Educator Caucus. “We received a lot of criticism during the Black Lives Matter Week of Action back in February.”