‘White Children Are Fine’: Baltimore Private School Under Fire for Diversity Director’s Comments

A private all-girls Catholic school in Baltimore is under fire for an employee’s comments about providing students of color spaces “away” from “white gaze.”

Kalea Selmon is the Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Maryvale Preparatory School. Selmon reportedly spoke at the National Association of Independent Schools’ (NAIS) 2021 “People of Color Conference.”

{snip}

In videos from her presentation, Selmon can be heard saying “it is necessary for BIPOC students to have spaces away from white gaze,” and that it is “absolutely okay” to provide BIPOC students with something but not white students because “the white children are fine.”

In the same presentation, Selmon says she counted the number of BIPOC students in sixth through twelfth grade at Maryvale, which gave her a total of 70 out of 460 total students. “They are our why,” she said.

Once Selmon’s comments came to light, an email was reportedly sent out to families on behalf of both the school’s President and Chair of the Board of Trustees saying Maryvale does not teach critical race theory (CRT), and their teaching is “based on Catholic faith grounded in the Hallmarks of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur.”

The email went on to claim that Maryvale aligns its curriculum and programs with those principles, and its “Justice, Equity, Diversity. and Inclusion works is essential” to its “missions to educate young women for life.”

{snip}

Despite Maryvale’s claims that it does not teach CRT, it has incorporated lessons from Pollyanna Inc.’s Racial Literacy curriculum into its middle school classrooms. Pollyanna is a national nonprofit that “works with academic and other institutions to achieve their diversity, equity and inclusion goals,” and one of its consultants, Jason Craige Harris, admitted in an eSeminar for The New York Association of Independent Schools (NYAIS) that while racial literacy and CRT are “a little bit different,” racial literacy has been “influenced by ideas from” CRT.

{snip}