Cass S.D. 63 recently issued the following announcement.
Cass School District 63 FOIA Officer Gayle Wilson said that the school system has not incorporated any of the controversial 1619 Project into the curriculum.
The New York Times’ 1619 Project said that America's true founding was 1619, not 1776, because the former was the year slaves first arrived in the U.S. Its creators claimed some colonists fought in the American Revolution "primarily" to preserve slavery.
Though the project did receive criticisms, its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 for its introductory essay.
The project’s success resulted in a jointly created educational curriculum by the NYT and the Pulitzer Center for districts to use if they desire.
To prevent schools from using the 1619 Project, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) proposed legislation to block public schools that use the curriculum from receiving federal funding.
“The New York Times’s 1619 Project is a racially divisive, revisionist account of history that denies the noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded,” Cotton said in a July statement. “Not a single cent of federal funding should go to indoctrinate young Americans with this left-wing garbage.”
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