Burbank Unified School District in California is using time, resources, and taxpayer funding to indoctrinate its students with race-based curriculum and radical gender ideology behind parents’ backs.

Documents obtained by the Center for American Liberty and shared exclusively with The Federalist show a widespread push from the BUSD to inundate children with LGBT-loaded and race-based curriculum and resources.

One form circulated by the district, labeled an “Individual Transition Plan,” not only offers whoever fills out the paperwork a chance to alert school administrators to their plans to embrace radical gender ideology, select different pronouns, and use the sex-protected spaces of their choice, but also features two opportunities to cut parents out of the process.

The form also declares a parent or guardian’s sign-off on the ITP, which asks students what “support” they want from the school, is merely “optional,” per California law.

A “Gender Support Plan,” which emails show BUSD obtained from radical gender ideology organization Gender Spectrum, similarly asks if “caregivers are aware of the student’s gender status” and asks whoever fills out the form to rank what level of support those caregivers offer them. Additionally, the document emailed to various BUSD teachers and staff by the then-Director of Student Services Stacy Cashman signals the establishment of a “safe adult” on school grounds who is aware of the student’s transgenderism — even if the parents are not.

“If the student’s caregivers are not aware of the student’s gender status, how will school/home communication be handled?” another question on the form asks

In an email in response to a public records request in March 2022, Cashman confirmed that “parental notification occurs when students want their parents involved.”

BUSD’s embrace of “gender support plans” is part of an alarming trend across the country where schools seek to secretly initiate children’s “social transitions” by nudging students towards radical gender ideology without their parents’ knowledge or consent.

BUSD did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

DEI

The school district’s devotion to racism disguised as “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programming also signals its participation in a concerning craze taking over American classrooms.

The California school district’s website features an “Anti-Racist Statement” that “officially denounces racism as the product of White default/ supremacy culture” and claims “all lives cannot matter until Black lives and the lives of indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) matter.” The declaration also invokes George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others to claim that black Americans “have had a unique and traumatic history in terms of racial relations, equality, and equity.”

BUSD also established a DEI Committee committed to “create an environment within BUSD where all students, especially students of color, can thrive and be successful.”

The district’s “antiracist” declarations might not be a secret, but its attempt to incorporate segregation and white guilt activities in the classroom is not widely publicized.

One newly released document revealed instructions for racial affinity group activity that separates participants based on their skin color.

“An initial step in processing racism is to configure in distinct groups of POC (those who experience racism directly) and white people (those who receive advantages based on racism),” the guideline page reads.

Once participants are sorted, the guideline page demands that they reflect on their “experiences with racism.”

White groups specifically are instructed to “explore the impact of whiteness and learned biases on their relationships and work,” including examining the impact of “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” Nonwhite participants, however, are convened to “heal from experiences of racism at work and in life outside of the gaze of white colleagues, and without the need to attend to white fragility.”

BUSD did not disclose to The Federalist whether the groups were utilized for students, educators, or both.

A 2022-2023 DEI goals agenda for the district, however, shows several schools’ plans to incorporate affinity groups into classrooms and teacher trainings. In the same agenda, one BUSD’ Huerta Middle School also committed to creating a “hate speech consequences” flow chart.

The administrators at several BUSD schools, some with students as young as 5 years old, committed to inserting “antiracist,” “inclusive,” and “diverse” books into their libraries and classroom reading lists.

“We will order books for the school library and classroom libraries as well. We will use the DEI Toolkits for each grade level to purchase additional books to supplement instruction,” Thomas Edison Elementary School wrote as its “action item.”

The action items came less than one year after the BUSD school board voted in October 2021 to hire a DEI consultant to fulfill its 2021-2022 goal of pushing race-based education and hiring on its staff and in its schools.

From October 2021 to June 2022, the board’s pick for the position, a woman whose résumé boasted “LGBTQ+ and gender advocacy” and time on a “Racial Justice Task Force,” was paid $80,000 to lecture teachers and students on “cultural competency, implicit bias, gender difference, disability, sexual harassment, inclusion and diversity, and other topics designed to increase awareness and support of equity and inclusion values.”

By the time the 2024-2025 supplemental funding budget dropped, BUSD had set aside more than $179,000 for DEI-specific staff and projects. By the end of the second interim, the district was expected to have spent more than $273,000 on DEI site teacher lead stipends and DEI site lead collaborations.

One PowerPoint from the 2023-2024 DEI Leads Session #1 asked BUSD participants to consider a “Litmus Test” that evaluates decision-making based on whether it is “best for kids from all marginalized populations.”

“Is it at the expense of BIPOC kids?” The questionnaire continues. “Do we have the resources and support to make this sustainable and equitable for all kids?”

The slides conclude by encouraging participants to “disrupt the system” and “identify ways that the system is harming marginalized folks and seek their input in determining a way to end the harm.”

“The revelations from Burbank Unified are deeply disturbing. For months, the Center for American Liberty has been seeking greater transparency from the district, only to uncover troubling policies that segregate students by race and enable schools to socially transition children without parental knowledge,” the Center for American Liberty CEO Mark Trammell said in a written statement. “These documents confirm our worst fears: schools are prioritizing radical ideology over parental rights and basic transparency. Parents deserve to know what their kids are being taught at school. We call on Burbank officials to immediately address these concerns and restore accountability to parents.”