Whistleblower Teacher Says She Faced ‘Retaliation’ for Exposing CRT

A teacher who exposed her school district’s “radicalized” Critical Race Theory (CRT) curriculum alleges she has faced “escalating retaliation” and will be the subject of a “pre-disciplinary administrative hearing” on Wednesday.

Ramona Bessinger, the Providence, Rhode Island, English teacher who described in July how her school district’s “radicalized curriculum” actually “created racial tensions among students and staff where none existed before,” tweeted the notice she received for her “pre-disciplinary administrative hearing.”

Bessinger said the new CRT program, based on the Marxist cultural ideology, was “the most racially divisive, hateful, and in large part, historically inaccurate curriculums I have ever seen in my teaching career.”

The veteran teacher reported at Legal Insurrection on October 3 that, when she received her new teaching assignments for the 2021-2022 academic year, she discovered she was “pulled” from teaching one of her English classes. She wrote she was assigned, instead, to teach “using CNN news sources, as well as Time for Kids, in a course structured to rely on racialized articles that separate children by the color of their skin.”

Bessinger reported some of the experiences she says she has encountered leading up to accusations against her that she is racist:

Everything in school now is about race. During orientation, teacher professional development included a “privilege walk,” in which teachers were requested to talk about our personal bias, to share our personal trauma, and to connect with children on their personal trauma. Much of the bias focus was on race. I declined to participate in the voluntary privilege walk, but observed it. We also were told to be surrogate parents to our students, given lesson plans on Malcolm X, and that discussions around justifiable violence towards white people should be taught to children of color.

The teacher wrote that in September the principal of her school sent her “multiple emails during the school day questioning me about my social media posts.”

“He requested a meeting where he grilled me for almost an hour about content in social media posts,” she alleged. “At the end of this meeting, he said he would monitor all my social media but was particularly bothered by my posts exposing the harmful racialized curriculum, books and projects.”

Bessinger wrote that on September 29, her union representative said teachers at her school had circulated a petition about her, but she did not know the focus of the petition.

“Judicial Watch has served a public records request seeking the petition against me,” she observed.

“The administration was well aware of this retaliation and hostility as it was happening,” Bessinger wrote. “My union also is aware, but I have not confidence the union will stick up for me and protect my rights. So today I formally filed an internal complaint about the retaliation and hostile work environment.”

Breitbart News reached out to Providence Public Schools for comment and is awaiting a response.