SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — With the election now behind us, a new political controversy has erupted in the Bay Area: public schoolteachers are being offered what some have referred to as a Donald Trump lesson plan.
Supporters of the Republican President-elect say it’s a way to help students better understand the election. Opponents argue that it represents leftist propaganda, it serves better to scare students about the incoming president.
Fakhra Shah, a teacher at Mission High School in Fremont, created the plan with the ultimate goal of empowering students, she said.
“This is anti-hate,” Shah told NBC Bay Area. “This is not just anti-Trump.”
After Election Day’s stunning result, in which billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, Shah wrote a letter to the school’s teaching staff. “A racist and sexist man has become president,” she wrote in the letter. She further urged teachers to allow their students to use this optional lesson plan, that she says, will allow the students to speak their minds.
“This is an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-Islamophobic [and] anti-homophobic philosophy,” Shah wrote in the lesson plan. “This is a philosophy about upliftment, hope and justice.”
The plan also asks teachers to console students who have fears of being deported after President-elect Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric over the course of his campaign. “We do not have to go anywhere, not Canada, not ‘back’ to any place we came from,” Shah wrote.
According to Shah, the lesson plan is about being open regarding the President-elect’s agenda. “I want to be clear that we are not brainwashing anyone,” she said adamantly. “This is about a dialogue.”
Lita Blanc of the United Educators of San Francisco has posted the lesson plan on the organization’s website. “Many people in this country have had a strong reaction to what’s happened and I think the framework that was provided is a decent framework,” Blanc said.
However, Harmeet Dhillon, who leads San Francisco’s chapter of the Republican Party, has a supreme disagreement with the lesson plan, and said, contrary to how its been broadcasted, does nothing but push an agenda.
“This is a specific anti-Trump agenda teaching students they need to be afraid for the next four years, that they are at risk,” she said.
