Northridge Learning Center will no longer distribute the packet and the section on the Civil War will be rewritten, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
Northridge Learning Center, according to its website, is an accredited education resource center that works to help students across the state earn credits for their classes. The center received its accreditation through Cognia, an organization that accredits primary and secondary schools nationwide.
Parents reached out to Northridge this week to convey their concerns.
One of the first parents to raise the point, Nancy McKendrick, said her daughter was shocked by what was in the history packet and brought what was written to her mother’s attention. The chapter stated that people who were enslaved were “considered property so it was not in the best interest of a slave owner to treat a slave poorly.”
“Many slaves worked so closely with their masters that they were treated as family,” it also claimed.
There was noted in the packet that human slavery is wrong and cruel acts did take place.
“Individuals who were enslaved were not treated with kindness,” Emma Houston, the special assistant to the vice president of equity, diversity and inclusion at the University of Utah, told the Tribune. “That’s a fact. They were stripped of their names and cultures and everything. It’s an issue of reporting history—not the history that we want it to be, but the actual history of how individuals were treated.”
A parent of a Black child wrote that her son would have been “crushed” to read what was written in the packet.
Conveying these concerns and questioning the material is important, says Houston.
“For individuals who see this, it’s OK to not be silent,” she said. “They can challenge it.”
Chief Diversity Officer at Weber State University, Adrienne Andrews, called what was written in the history packet “obscene.”
“It negates the facts and real lived experiences of people who were brutalized,” Andrews told the newspaper. “That is not OK. Knowing the truth does not mean we have to stay in that history. It means we can learn from that history and commit ourselves to not doing that again.”
Mark Peterson, the public relations director for the Utah State Board of Education told Newsweek that Northridge Learning Center is a private company and is not subject to Utah State Board of Education governance or regulation.
“The enslavement of human beings is appalling,” Peterson said. “There is nothing kind about slavery.”
A press release obtained by Newsweek that was sent out to parents and students from Northridge Learning Center thanked those who brought the language of the packet to light and offered an apology “for any emotional offense or harm it may have caused.”
“Those of us in education say that it is truly a lifelong process, and for us, this was clearly a ’teachable moment,’ that we will be using to fullest advantage,” the release reads. “To that end, we commit to 1) an in-depth review of all of our textbooks and teaching materials by a diverse group of educators to ensure there is nothing else that needs to be addressed; and 2) a thorough vetting of any new materials introduced into our system to ensure they meet our high standards for diversity and inclusion, as well as the truth.”
