West Nova News

When Natassia Grover saw that Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) were furthering a critical race theory-type of curriculum, she removed her three kids on Aug. 17 and began homeschooling them. 

“My kids are not going to receive a rigorous academic education anymore,” said Grover, whose children are 14, 12 and 7 years old. “It's going to be ideological indoctrination and I'm done.”

Grover is among the parents who are taking issue with the LCPS spending $422,000 on consultants to create a curriculum based on critical-race theory, according to media reports.

“Little kids don't have a racial identity until they're taught one and I know this from my own experience,” Grover told West Nova News. “My kids didn't even know what race was until they went into the public schools where then they learned the terminology. They did not know that their little friend was Black. They just knew that was their friend with the dark hair and glasses. They didn't understand the term ‘Black.’ They didn't have the words to be racist.”

Grover would rather see the Virginia school district spend $422,000 on buying more school buses.

“The money should be returned to the taxpayer or be used to hire more bus drivers,” she said. “Some kids had to wait 30 to 45 minutes for a bus or sit three kids to a seat once they were on the school bus.”

What Grover finds controversial about critical-race theory is that it allegedly encourages children to form a racial identity and to classify each other by their appearance.

“Based on what racial identity they are taught, they are pitched against each other,” she said. “Some kids are perceived as the ones who are perpetually disadvantaged, who are oppressed and who are victims of a systemic problem while the other children who fit into these other categories are considered oppressors and they have a duty to do the work to be anti-racist.”

The problem is that the work of being anti-racist never ends, according to Grover.

“You'll never actually fully attain the level of an anti-racist,” she said. “You're just always gonna be working for it. It breaks down interpersonal trust because in every single interaction that you have with somebody who doesn't look like you, there's a power dynamic. You wonder where they are on the power pyramid and am I oppressing them? Am I causing micro-aggressions? Or is that a micro-aggression against me? You feel like you’re walking on eggshells.”

As previously reported in West Nova News, President Donald Trump recently banned critical race-theory education in the federal government.

"[Critical-race theory] is especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged," Trump said on Sept. 17.  "Teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words."