The Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) Office of “Equity Affairs” is now costing taxpayers $574,647 a year for a staff of four.

In addition to Rodney Trice, Lauryn Mascarenaz, and Teresa Bunner who make a combined salary of over $300,000 a year, WCPSS added Christina Spears to the staff of the Office of Equity Affairs.

Duties in her job description include planning, developing, and delivering “school and district-based professional development on cultural competence, and culturally
relevant instruction.”

Other duties:

• Provides coaching support to school-based Professional Learning
  Teams (PLT) to assist in problem-solving equity challenges.
• Coordinates the implementation of district diversity and equity
  workshops, presentations, learning opportunities and other strategies
  that promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
• Actively engages student groups as full partners to interrupt
  opportunity gaps and the predictability of student achievement
  outcomes based on social and cultural factors.
• Serves as a liaison to other coordinating teachers for the
  alignment of equity policies, practices, and procedures.
• Assists Directors with Title IX and Title VI investigations
  concerning various aspects of discrimination and discrimination
  trends.
• Assists in monitoring, measuring and assessing programs related to
  the school system’s progress toward achieving diversity goals.

Spears is making $5,639.32 per month or $67,670.76 per year as a “Special Assistant” to the Assistant Superintendent of Equity Affairs, Rodney Trice.

The combined salary of all four employees equals roughly 7 classroom teachers at an average of $50,000 a year.

If one adds the budget for the “Office of Equity Affairs” to the salaries, ($204,846) the dollar total is  $574,647.00. That’s enough money to fund 11 classroom teachers at an average of $50,000.00 a year.

Parents and taxpayers would do well to remember this when WCPSS is complaining they cannot live within their budget, aren’t providing the supplies to classrooms that are needed or claim they cannot afford the shift smaller classroom sizes.

Earlier this month, the Twitter account for the Office of Equity Affairs tweeted out an article featuring Spears.

The grammar and punctuation error-ridden article on Spears was written by NaShonda Cooke, a member of the NEA union affiliate, the NC Association of Educators.

Cooke was one of several teachers featured in a TIME magazine expose. In the TIME article on Cooke, she complained was underpaid and could not make ends meet while making $69,000 a year plus benefits.

The outlet Cooke writes about Spears in is “Women Advance NC.” This organization is part of the Blueprint NC network tasked with ‘crippling, eviscerating’ and ‘slamming’ any and all Republicans holding office.

According to the Secretary of State, Women’s Advance NC was registered by Laura B. Edwards and was set up as a 501(c)3 by incorporator Michael Weisel.

Weisel is the go-to lawyer for Progress NC, one of the most far left organization in the state which for years has disseminated incorrect and outright false information on education in NC.

What is the Office of Equity Affairs and Why Does It Exist?

As previously reported, WCPSS created the Office of Equity Affairs to satisfy a complaint filed by the NC NAACP and various other groups over the alleged ‘school to prison pipeline’ and the higher rate of suspension of minority students.

The creation of the Office of Equity Affairs is specifically mentioned in the recent agreement between the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and WCPSS.

The agreement, in conjunction with discipline policy changes already made, mimics the PROMISE program that gained national attention for allowing Nikolas Cruz’s behavior to go unchecked and murder his classmates in Parkland, Florida.

What does this office do? Officially, this is the line:

“We are committed to working to eliminate racial or socioeconomic inequities within our school system by eliminating achievement gaps and disparities in student discipline.”

However, as far as I’ve been able to discern from job descriptions and activities by the staff, this office serves to ‘train’ teaching staff about their ‘white privilege‘ or ‘implicit white bias‘ and to shame teachers for ‘culturally appropriating‘ during holiday lessons.

While there’s nothing wrong with examining barriers to achievement, there is something inherently wrong with blaming only alleged racism or ‘whiteness’ of teaching or support staff for said barriers.  The kid and their family play a role too.

All of this is being done in the name of “diversity” and the ever-shifting definition of “equity,” of course.  I encourage parents and taxpayers to go through the entire “Equity” page at WCPSS in detail.