The Wages of Woke

Just Communities Central Coast (JCCC), the woke purveyor of school-sponsored bigotry and the skulduggery of Critical Race Theory, has finally bit the dust. While JCCC may shapeshift, mutate, and re-emerge in new virulent forms, this is a moment to dance for joy! We should celebrate this brief moment for good triumphed over evil, courage over fear, and love over hate.

In late 2018, a concerned group of parents and educators formed Fair Education Santa Barbara (FESB) to advocate for children and parents and to challenge the hidden curriculum of JCCC, which has been funded to the tune of over $1.7 million by the Santa Barbara Unified School District (SBUSD). At the time, the SBUSD and JCCC said that JCCC’s ironically named “anti-bias” training was “intellectual property,” like Google’s source code or Coca-Cola’s secret recipe, and could not possibly be shared with the public.

FESB’s only option to expose this scam was to sue JCCC and include their bigoted curriculum as part of the lawsuit. This allowed people to see and share JCCC’s once-secret “Table of Oppression” which segregates people, based on their race, into groups such as privileged oppressors or targeted victims. From JCCC’s once hidden documents, it is evident that JCCC took its cues from 1930s Germany and apartheid-era South Africa as to the power and effect of dehumanizing and dividing specific groups of people.

Fair Education’s first-in-the-nation lawsuit against JCCC lit the spark for the prairie fire that has spread across America, to provide parents with the information and knowledge needed to fight the racially divisive, anti-American, sexually over-the-top indoctrination in our nation’s schools. We have participated in the formation of many other parent groups across this country and nearly a dozen similar lawsuits have followed our lead.

While FESB did not succeed in the Santa Barbara Superior Court, we eventually succeeded in the court of public opinion. After exposing JCCC for their bigotry and harmful tactics, only the most radical and willfully blind Progressive partisans, politicians, and press continued to support JCCC. Curiously, even after sharing JCCC’s hidden curriculum with them, the Hutton Parker Foundation continued to extend tax-exempt support to JCCC. However, most other philanthropists distanced themselves as they came to realize just how badly JCCC had duped them. JCCC wasn’t solving racism, sexism, or any other “ism” for that matter. JCCC’s secret curriculum fomented and encouraged divisiveness, all in the pursuit of more tax-exempt and school-dispensed tax-payer dollars. It was a poisonous nonprofit business model, cynically cloaked in virtue. Even the notoriously woke Santa Barbara Unified School District, whose recently retired assistant superintendent birthed JCCC in 2010, began to move on to bucketing money to other social justice warriors, leaving JCCC bereft of funding. On August 31, 2022, JCCC was dissolved.

In the end, FESB succeeded in educating a reluctant and openly hostile community on JCCC’s decade-long poisoning of young minds. Thank you to all who supported this valiant effort, spoke up at school board meetings, wrote letters, and stood with us, shoulder to shoulder, against the destructive, deceitful, and now-defunct JCCC.

Sheridan Rosenburg and James Fenkner are parents and co-founders Fair Education Santa Barbara; Gregory Gandrud, treasurer; Jon Morse, secretary.