School of Woke by Kenny Xu

Author:Kenny Xu [XU, KENNY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

It’s Hilda Time

In the summer of 2020, the Santa Barbara Unified School District, in a Southern California county where Joe Biden got 32 percent more votes than Donald Trump, introduced its next superintendent of schools, Hilda Maldonado.2 The Mexican American woman came from the struggling Los Angeles Unified School District to take over for the freshly fired Cary Matsuoka, who was deemed by the Santa Barbara school board to be incapable of doing the job the board wanted him to do. Cary was too professional, too methodical—not truly one of them. So the board had to make a change.

Hilda’s career was basically nurtured by the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion department at LA Unified. She was the “senior executive director of diversity, learning and instruction” in her last two years there. Before that she was the “executive director of multilingual and multicultural education.” There’s no beating around the bush. She was a creature of the woke establishment.3

Hilda came to Santa Barbara riding a wave of praise from the all-female school board that appointed her. “She is clearly a courageous, inspiring, tireless leader whom we can lift up, look up to, and learn from,” said the board president, Kate Ford.4 “Our appointment of Ms. Hilda Maldonado gets a Triple ‘R’ rating: Right Person, Right Place, Right Time,” said board member Wendy Sims-Moten.

Maldonado was hired on May 26, 2020—the day after the killing of George Floyd. In fact, she was hired in that small, liminal bubble of time between the day that George Floyd was actually killed and the day that his killing became an international sensation—sparking the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and forcing the world to grapple with a powerful “systemic racism” narrative that extended way beyond policing into schools, health care, and even sports.

Ingurgitated by the flooding strand of racial sentiment, Maldonado instantly became one of the most powerful superintendents the district had ever seen, and her arrival signaled a new era of woke CRT ideology in Santa Barbara schools—abetted by the highly progressive Santa Barbara school board. “Philosophically they are in the same circle… they actually partied together,” said Rosanne Crawford, a former educator and candidate for the board, about the board’s relationship with Maldonado. “They would refer to each other as sisters,” Crawford recalled in an interview with me.

The fact hadn’t gone unnoticed among the city’s residents. “Our school board, which was historically balanced and had debate, dialogue and diversity of opinion, became 5–0 of one political viewpoint, and it’s not a moderate or centrist viewpoint,” wrote Alice Post, a member of the Coalition for Neighborhood Schools, in the Santa Barbara News-Press.5 Members of the city’s progressive wing were already entrenched—and now that they had a “sister” to lead them, there was no limit to the extremes they could go to with their new agenda. Cage Englander, a former candidate for the Santa Barbara school board, told me that “since the time of Reagan, there was nobody who got elected to the board; it was all people retiring halfway through their terms, nominating someone new and nobody [ever running] against them.

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