By Ray Cardello for December 7, 2021 Season 7 / Post 28

I have written about the new Director of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice for the SAU16 Exeter District, Andres Mejas. I questioned the need for such a director in Exeter, who approved the hiring for this position, and who set the pay scale for this new position in SAU16. There was little information distributed at the announcement of Mejas’ hiring and little since except the expansion of his role. He was hired as a resource for Exeter High School, but now he is counseling Middle School students. I learned this week from an article on the GraniteGrok site that Mejas is on the board of the Seacoast Chapter of Black Lives Matter. I needed to know more.

I admit that my exposure to BLM was garnered from the news. I wrote about this chapter’s impact on the Exeter Select Board and how radical their demands were. When I went to their site today, I realized how important the term “demand” is to this group. I am curious what gives a group of people the right to demand? Most people have things they would like to see differently in a city, town, state, or nationally. Still, it is usually brought about by getting people elected who share their views, ideals, and wants. I never realized we just had to develop a logo, website, and a list of demands. Was Mejas hired voluntarily by the SAU, or did he demand the position and salary?

I notice on their website that there is a significant list of demands and their plans and goals for Exeter and the Seacoast. I do not see their evaluation of Exeter and whether there is a transformative need for changes via their demands. They made their demands of the town. Now they have someone embedded in the school system. What is their next move? My thought is they will work to get one of their members elected to the Town Council.

Since I am focusing on Mejas, let’s look at the specific demands BLM has for the school board:

All Candidates for School Board

• We demand the removal of school resource officers and adding diverse social workers in the schools.
• We demand annual training hosted by a Black Lives Matter Seacoast recognized trainer, for all educators and school officials on implicit bias, personal and interpersonal racism, systemic racism and anti-racism.
• We demand the review of the educational curriculum to be more inclusive of African American history & culture and classrooms to be more wide-ranging to the needs of children of color.

My answer to these demands would be No, No, and No. 

The school resource officer is in place to ensure the students’ safety and help counsel anyone who might have a negative influence on that safety. This demand is a spin-off of the “defund the police” movement, which has proven to be lunacy over the last year.

It is presumptive of BLM to claim they are the experts on bias and racism or that they have the right to insist on the training of educators and school officials. This demand is as overreaching as their demand for police officers to perform mandatory community service.

I demand that our schools teach history, period. U.S., World, Ancient are excellent places to start, and they should all be taught in a color-blind manner. 

I also demand that schools teach math, the sciences, and even languages before moving on to Equity, Diversity, and Justice. Guess that makes me a racist in the eyes of BLM, but I think that makes me a commonsensical conservative, and to call me one is a compliment.

This article was first published on The Liberty Loft thelibertyloft.com