WCS Director of Teaching, Learning & Assessment Laurette Carle Misinformed Public About ‘White Privilege’ Training at School Board Meeting

Laurette Carle, executive director of Teaching, Learning, and Assessment for Williamson County Schools, misinformed the public and members of the school board about the “white privilege” Cultural Competency in-service training video series teachers were required to watch during the academic year 2018-2019 at last Monday’s WCS school board meeting.

It appears that Carle’s misrepresentation was intentional obfuscation, and that she purposely used examples of planning documents from previous academic years and referenced “eplan” documents that were not on point without ever once showing any evidence that the “white privilege” training, which is the center of the controversy, was either presented to or approved by the Tennessee Department of Education, as required by law.

WCS Superintendent Mike Looney asked Carle to explain to the board and the public “about the [professional development] process we use in Williamson County Schools” that culminated in the “white privilege” Cultural Competency series.

The Tennessee Star has included a complete transcript of Carle’s statements, along with documented evidence that some of what Ms. Carle said is not supported by the publicly available documents found at the website she referenced in her presentation.

Carle, a graduate of Bates College in Maine, has a masters degree from Duke University. In 2018 she contributed to the Tennessee U.S. Senate campaign of Democrat Phil Bredesen through an earmarked donation to the left-wing fundraising giant ACT Blue, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Left-wing Democratic candidates such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have used ACT Blue extensively to raise funds for their state and national campaigns. ACT Blue is widely known as the online site where liberals go to tithe.

The Star asked Mrs. Carle this question via email Monday morning about the influence her political affiliation may have had on her role in the “white privilege” training:

“Does your role in the approval and dissemination of the controversial and divisive “white privilege” in-service training videos reflect your political philosophy, as demonstrated by your financial contributions to the 2018 Tennessee U.S. Senate campaign of Democratic nominee Phil Bredesen?”

Carle did not respond to our question.

Here is the transcript of Carle’s comments at the March 25 WCS School Board meeting, beginning at the 40:30 mark of the video:

Looney: At this time, I’d like to ask Mrs. Carle to come forward. Laurette is in charge of our professional development processes in the district. And she works with state and federal agencies to make sure that we are in compliance with the law and follow their procedures. Laurette, if you don’t mind, would you talk to the board about the process we use in Williamson County Schools, according to the regulations we work under.

Carle: I’ll be happy to thank you. I’m going to advance. OK, so you keep me on target here. OK, so thank you for your attention, board members. I wanted to go ahead and you can go ahead on that slide, thank you. One of the things, when we do when we’re planning PD [Professional Development], of course, is to look at our board’s strategic plan. But another thing we do is we do a plan through the State Department of Ed through a system called Eplan.

And Eplan is what the state uses to monitor a lot of what we do here in this school district and every school district. And a typical cycle of planning with the State Department of Ed follows the bullets on the slide right here where we begin with a planning tool for the district. It’s called the LEA Plan and every Local Education Association [Note: Mrs. Carle misspoke here. LEA stands for Local Education Agency, not Local Education Association] in the state does that.

Carle: We do that in January and February and submit that to the state. Our new one is in review with the state right now. We’re waiting on approval.

After that in the summer our schools then do a planning system within that same tool Eplan and they inherit our goals and strategies and work on their own school level plans. But that planning tool has implications then for the federal funding applications which are also in Eplan. So there are two buckets in e-plan. I’m talking about the planning and then the funding.

When we get to the funding applications for our formulas grants, like our Title programs and our IDEA grants we go through a process about this time a year where we begin that it’s due in April or May, late April early May. We have to make connection in that funding application to that LEA Plan that I just spoke of earlier. And you [members of the WCS School Board] do approve that funding application every May as Doctor Looney mentioned we just give you just the funding part of that but we can always answer more questions this year if you need to. The second part of that is, then, once after you’ve approved it it goes to the state and it is approved and we’re given our final allocations to work with in July digitally through EPlan.

So in August of 2017 there was a new title, they switched some numbers around and added a new program through the ESA federal program called title four for the student support and academic enrichment grant. We knew it was coming but we didn’t have the details till August.

Carle: So in May of 2017, you [The Williamson County Schools School Board] did approve our funding application but it did not include Title Four. In August of 2017 we went to the state ESA conference and learned about the purposes and allowable uses of this new Title Four grant. And our planning team focused in on one of the allowable purposes for safe and healthy students.

Specifically on the suggested bullet that this is a, by the way on this slide here there’s a capture of the State, the TDOE’s training on Title Four and in their training we had a bullet at the bottom of the left-hand column you’ll see about culture, the responsible teaching, and pedagogy. (emphasis added. The Star has added a red arrow to show this in the slide presented by Mrs. Carle.)

We chose that as a planning team because we also had identified that earlier in the spring even before we got the details of this grant that that was in need here in Williamson County schools. On this slide at the very top in the black banner, you’ll see eplan.tn.gov anybody can go to eplan.tn.gov and see the publicly approved plans as well as publicly approved funding applications for the State of Tennessee.

Superintendent Mike Looney then interjected, and here is the transcript of that back and forth between Looney and Carle:

Looney: Laurette, I want to interrupt here and make sure that we say that again.

Carle: Sure.

Looney: The State Department of Education publishes every school district in Tennessee’s professional development plan–the entire e-planning, which includes professional development, on the website eplan.tn.gov.

Carle: That’s correct.

Looney: And ours is there as well?

Carle: Yes it is.

On Monday morning The Star emailed Carle, but we also CC’d WCS Superintendent Looney and school system spokeswoman Carol Birdsong, with the several questions regarding Carle’s March 25 presentation, the first of which was:

 “At the March 25, 2019 WCS Board meeting you made a statement whose veracity we can not confirm. You stated that the WCS professional development plan for academic year 2018-2019 was included in the LEA plan and was publicly available for viewing at the website eplan.tn.gov. We have gone to the website eplan.tn.gov and have found no document or section of document there that is labeled WCS professional development for academic year 2018-2019. Can you explain why you told the WCS Board and the public that such a document was available for public viewing at eplan.tn.gov when it is not? Alternatively, if the document is there and we missed it, can you show us how we can find it there?”

The  Star went to the eplan.tn.gov website and secured this copy of the LEA Plan history for Williamson County Schools for academic year 2018-2019:

The Star attempted to verify Superintendent Looney’s statements that, “The State Department of Education publishes every school district in Tennessee’s professional development plan — the entire e-planning, which includes professional development, on the website e-plan.tn.gov,” and “Ours [WCS’s professional development plan] is there as well.” (emphasis added)

This statement, however, does not appear to be factually correct.

This document found at eplan.tn.gov appears to be what Mrs. Carle refers to as the WCS LEA plan.

There is no element within that document, at least as far as The Star could determine, that constitute’s WCS’s professional development plan that Dr. Looney said at the March 25 WCS School board meeting was “there [at the eplan.tn.gov website] as well.”

The Star was able to find more detail on the slide Mrs. Carl presented that the slide stated was  a “screen shot of an action step in the FY 2018 [LEA] Plan [for Williamson County].”

Here is the screenshot The Star found that contains the word-for-word content included in Mrs. Carl’s slide, but has a significant amount of additional information that Mrs. Carl did not share with the WCS School Board.

The screenshots are difficult to read, so here is The Star summary.

This is a screenshot of a “Plan relationship” for Williamson County (940) Public District – FY 2018 – Rev 4 Title IV.”

It is part of the LEA Plan Funding Summary for a Title IV grant in the amount of $25,628 that is a “Related LEA Plan Action Step,” specifcally as it relates to Section 5 (Safe and Healthy Students), Subsection 5.3 (Culturally Responsive Teaching) and further to Subsection 5.3.1, “Culturally Responsive Teaching.”

It reads as follows:

Description:

Purchase book and design book study for all principals on this topics. Partner with Corwin PD Solutions to provide some on-site professional learning for principlas on two dates in early 2018. Have a few principals lead summer PD for interested teachers on this topic in June. Have Corwin lead PD on our back to school district-wide PD day in August to kick this off with ALL teachers. Design short follow up lessons for principals to used with their staff to sustain the learning and conversation over the 2017-18 school year.

Benchmark Indicator:

Contract and agenda training by Corwin; Evaluation of each step of PD; List of specific stragies principals will begin to use second semester of 2017-18 school year.

Person Responsible:

Laurette Carle

Estimated Completion Date:

4/6/2018

Note that this content, available at eplan.tn.gov, was for FY 2018, the 2017-2018 academic school year.

The Star was unable to find any professional development plan at eplan.tn.gov for WCS for FY 2019, the 2018-2019 academic year, the current year in which WCS required all teachers to participate in In-service/professional development days that included the Williamson County Cultural Competency series that included the three modules that featured “privilege theory” and “white privilege” concepts.

Mrs. Carle continued her presentation, which you can watch beginning at 40:30 in the YouTube video of the meeting here:

The transcript of Carle’s comments continues here:

Carle: So, the LEA plan when you look at the planning part of the plan and at the plan itself you will see goals and strategies and actions steps and in this slide, I have to put my little reading glasses on here for this part. In this slide you can see that we had for LEA plan goals, strategies and actions steps that year, we had a strategy, an action step connected to culturally responsive teaching. So this was again in the spring of 2017 leading up to the 17-18 school year. After that we then went from the planning side to the funding side. We did the funding application for the title four FY-18 in the fall because as I said the state didn’t have all the details for it, it was new and came out in the fall.

So you [members of the WCS School Board] approved the funding application for that in October of 2017. We got the final approval and allocation from the state in November of 2017 and if you explore any plan, I’ve put a screenshot there of the verbiage we used for what we planned to do with that program and it did include culturally responsive teaching and it did include bringing us consultant from Corwin PD Solutions to work with our principals first before we would move on to work with our teachers the following year.

We did the same process the year after that. So that was a short year because the grant didn’t come until the fall. The next spring we started working on our plan and then our application for FY-19 which is this current school year of 2018-2019. (emphasis added)

Again you approved the funding part in May of 2018. The State approved the application with the final allocation July of 2018 and, again, in the program details, we again alluded to the work we had already started and planned to continue in the following year on culturally responsive teaching.

The same time that this was going on the other time you were involved or the State was involved with any kind of approval of PD [Professional Development] is when we use dates within the calendar, it’s complicated.

But from our stockpile days of our school calendar, we also have to get approval on the topics for those stockpiled PD [Professional Development] days that fall within our school calendar. So we went through that process as well in April of 2018 for this current year by submitting what the topics would be and we included culturally responsive teachings as one of the three topics for those three days. (emphasis added)

And then also we got approval from the Commissioner of Education just ten days later last April. (emphasis added)

This statement by Mrs. Carle is misleading.

She states that “we also have to get approval on the topics for those stockpiled PD [Professional Development] days that fall within our school calendar.”

Here Carle appears to be referring to the three days described only as “Stockpile Professional Development Days” included in the Williamson County School Calendar which was submitted to the WCS board on May 7, 2018 and approved by TDOE on May 8,2018. As The Star has reported extensively, this “calendar” does not comply with Section 49-6-3004 of Tennessee Code Annotated that requires that the local school board approve an in-service training plan (not a calendar), and that plan must subsequently be approved by the Commissioner of Education prior to implementation.

Mrs. Carle further states that “So we went through that process as well in April of 2018 for this current year by submitting what the topics would be and we included culturally responsive teachings as one of the three topics for those three days.” (emphasis added)

She then showed a screen shot — taken from somewhere that is not eplan.tn.gov — that shows former Commissioner Candace McQueen approved “topics for stockpiled professional development days that included culturally responsive teaching” on April 27, 2018.

Carle does not, however, show the actual document that specifically lists topics approved by day.

The Star believes the approved Professional Stockpile Development Days were the same as those listed on the calendar: January 3, 2019, January 4, 2019, and February 18,2019.

It was on these three days that WCS required WCS teachers to view the Module 1, Module 2, and Module 3 videos of the Williamson County Cultural Competency series that featured “privilege theory” and the controversial “white privilege” concept.

These topics, — “white privilege” and “privilege theory” — The Star believes, were not listed on the topics submitted by WCS in April 2018 for approval by Commissioner McQueen.

The Star posed these two additional questions to Carle:

“You showed a slide on March 25 which was a screenshot showing Commissioner Candace McQueen approved the topics for 2018-2019 in-service calendar days, giving the audience the impression this screenshot was taken from an LEA plan publicly available at eplan.tn.gov. We can find no such image at eplan.tn.gov. From what website was this screenshot taken?”

“Can you produce the complete list of in-service day topics for 2018-2019 approved by Commissioner McQueen in April 2018?”

Carle did not respond to either question, and Birdsong’s earlier responses were entirely unresponsive.

Mrs. Carle, it appears, intentionally misled the WCS Board and the public in general to create the impression that “white privilege” as in-service topic was approved by former Commissioner McQueen, which it was not.

The transcript of Carle’s comments continues:

Carle: The grant process application and approval came next and I wanted to share with you also the verbiage we used in the budget narrative. So we had verbiage in our LEA plans we also had verbiage in the budget narrative itself of how we would spend that money. And this referenced again the work with Horacio Sanchez coming to work with our teachers from Corwin. The book we used for our book study with our principals and the plan to then work with some modules with teachers after that. The timeline we originally set out was even more aggressive than what we followed through. We did slow down after we initially planned this timeline. But again this was submitted in 2017 and approved that year.

So the implementation of that title four funded portion of our culturally responsive teaching pedagogy PD. We purchased books for all principals in November of 2017 for their reading. That was “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zoretta Hammond. We had the Corwin consultant who helped our principals understand the basics of all of that book. Horacio Sanchez presented to our principals two times in February and April of 2018 for four hours each time. So we split the day into two parts. We made a decision at that point not to deliver PD to teachers immediately but to hold that off until August. We then brought him back to do a systematic PD with all teachers for just half the day on our district ride day in August. He had an in-person conversation with one teacher per school in our PD center which we live-streamed out to all of our schools where the principals were leading with their staff at their schools. And then we followed that with the online modules Dr. Looney spoke of that he wanted us to do with. We had those with the principals leading our teachers.

Module one in the fall of this school year when they could fit it into their faculty meeting times or PD. The module two on our district-wide day of January third and module three on our site based day of February eighteenth.

The Star closed with this final question to Carle:

– – –

Photo “Laurette Carle” by Williamson County Television.

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