A kindergarten teacher who publicly questioned his school spending $250,000 on a “woke kindergarten” curriculum for “disrupting whiteness” amid plummeting numeracy and literacy rates has been suspended. .
Hayward Unified School District teacher Tiger Craven-Neeley said officials told him Thursday not to return to his classroom at Glassbrook Elementary School until further notice.
She said she was told the suspension was in effect while the district investigates allegations of “unprofessional conduct” after a tense meeting in which a colleague put her hand in her face and yelled that she was “a danger” to children.
Craven-Neeley, who is gay and describes himself as a liberal, propelled the school into the spotlight after questioning the decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the controversial curriculum. It’s described as an “abolitionist early learning system” designed to uproot white supremacy and disrupt racism, and nonbinary founder Akiea Gross rants on her Instagram about how she believes Israel and the United States have no right to exist.
After spending federal money on the program, the Hayward school saw numeracy among its 474 students drop to a new low of just 4 percent and literacy to just 12 percent.
Tiger Craven-Neeley (pictured) was suspended after raising concerns about the $250,000 Woke Kindergarten curriculum offered at his school.
The curriculum was designed by Woke Kindergarten founder Akiea ‘Ki’ Gross as an ‘abolitionist early learning system’.
Woke Kindergarten is blatant about its political leanings, with its social media pages filled with graphics about police abolition, anti-Israel messages, and even advocating for the abolition of money.
Craven-Neeley claims he was told to leave during a tense meeting in which another staff member put a hand in his face and called him a threat to the school, an account corroborated by another staff member in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“There was a lot of anger towards me,” he told the outlet. “I was explaining my point of view. They were talking about me.
‘I was shocked. This is my school. I didn’t do anything inappropriate. I left. I was very shaky.’
On Thursday, the teacher was called to a virtual conference and was advised to bring in a union representative before being told he was going on indefinite leave.
“It’s like a bitter vacation paid for with taxpayers’ money,” he said. “They don’t take students into account at all.”
He added that he’s worried that “they’re going to twist things to try to justify retaliation or try to appease staff or that they’re tired of me being a whistleblower or all of the above.”
Craven-Neeley says she tried to talk to school staff about her concerns about Woke Kindergarten before going public.
She insists she is not conservative and previously filed a lawsuit after her bosses tried to ban her from mentioning her husband in the classroom.
The philosophy of the “abolitionist education” program aimed at elementary school-aged children centers on the idea that the educational system as it stands, steeped in racism and other oppressive structures, cannot be reformed.
Instead, he advocates for “a kind of starting over,” Zeus Leonardo, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Craven-Neeley claims he was suspended after a tense meeting in which another staff member pointed a finger in his face and said he was a threat to the school.
The ‘Woke Kindergarten’ program states its mission as an ‘abolitionist early learning ecosystem’ that empowers teachers to uproot white supremacy, end racism and oppression, which are barriers to learning.
Glassbrook Elementary School in Hayward remains at the state’s lowest performing level on the Comprehensive School Improvement list
Woke Kindergarten is blatant about its political leanings, with its social media pages filled with graphics about police abolition, anti-Israel messages, and even advocating for the abolition of money.
One such lesson the program offers to elementary school children includes the “question” in which students are asked to consider “if the United States defunded the Israeli military, how could this money be used to rebuild Palestine?” ?”
Woke Kindergarten also teaches children a ‘wake up word of the day’, such as ‘cease fire’, to educate them with the ‘language of resistance… to introduce children to liberating vocabulary in a way they can digest. , understand and, most importantly, easily. , they use it in their criticism of the system.’
The for-profit company was founded by non-binary early educator Akiea ‘Ki’ Gross, who uses they/them pronouns.
Gross holds far-left views that include imagining a world “free of the American empire and free of Israel,” which they have previously referred to as a “made-up place.”
In an Instagram post defining the word ceasefire, they said: “One place that people are demanding a permanent ceasefire for is Palestine because they are being occupied or controlled by a made up place called Israel that has settlers called Zionists who are harming and killing the Palestinian people who have always lived on the land.’
Gross has far-left views that include imagining a world “free of the American empire and free of Israel,” which they have previously referred to as a “made-up place.”
One of the recent “wake-up words of the day” posted on the company’s Instagram was “ceasefire.”
Since the story made headlines, the school and district have been bombarded with “threatening and racist” messages and phone calls, according to spokesman Michael Bazeley.
He added that he could not comment on Gross’s “personal political or social views” and declined to discuss Craven-Neeley’s suspension.
But he said, “We would not furlough any employees in any kind of retaliation nor would we crush anyone’s free speech rights.”
Bazeley did not comment further on why the complainant had been ordered to stay home from work.