Forsyth County Georgia Board of Education - Jere Krischel - 08/19/2025

First off, point of clarification, last month was my first absence in 4 years, not 3 years as reported. I hope to make this next streak even longer, and I hope you're all here to share it with me.

A few short notes regarding the last working meeting before I get on a soapbox.
I'm very happy to hear that even though some federal funding is delayed, at worst we're looking at a 1.5 million dollar impact from possible federal funding changes. The fact that we are not at more risk, is a testament to both the fiscal and social responsibility of our Forsyth County Schools
I was trying to get to the proposed Equal Opportunity Employment changes, and there's a broken link on the website - the final links generated by eboardsolutions.com are dynamically generated, and people need to copy the link *before* they click it to make it stable: https://simbli.eboardsolutions.com/Meetings/Attachment.aspx?S=4069&AID=1853372&MID=123318

Which brings me to the topic I'd like to bring up today - the inherent contradiction between Equal Opportunity Employment and Affirmative Action.

The board policy reads: "The Forsyth County Board of Education does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, age, disability, or sex in its employment practices." This clear, direct statement makes no caveats - people are only judged on merit. Which is the way it should always have been.

But sadly, after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the avowed racist Lyndon Johnson, created the terrible policy of "affirmative action" by executive order. Until that order was revoked on January 21, 2025, by President Trump, I had not fully considered just how normal this systemic racism seemed to me. For over 50 years I lived in a world where there were legal racial quotas. And I was told over and over again that somehow, this wasn't racist.

But indeed, it was. Even as the racists tried to obscure their quotas by finding other proxies they could use for race, their goal stayed the same - discrimination based on race. The cognitive dissonance of being told for decades that only content of character should matter, but then we still had to judge people by skin color to make things fair, burned of injustice.

While affirmative action in college admissions was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2023, we haven't yet had a similar clear-cut case in general employment law. I'm sure it will be coming, but I'm glad that in the meantime, Forsyth County Schools have such a clear, unambiguous stance against affirmative action.

This isn't to say that things have ever been perfectly fair - horrible things, even right here in Forsyth County, have been perpetrated against people on the basis of race. In 1912, over a thousand black residents were terrorized and driven from their homes, not to return in any real numbers for almost 80 years.

But the tide turned in the late 1990s, and we've now built Forsyth County into a home for everyone, regardless of skin color. This didn't happen because of quotas, or because we terrorized white people in retaliation for the sins of their ancestors, but because we stopped putting race front and center of everyone's identity.

To put it in crude terms, you don't fight rape with more rape, and you don't fight racism with more racism. You just put a stop to the sin.

So I'd like to thank the Board for their due diligence in going through all of the policies we have, and for re-affirming our commitment to the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., to judge people by the content of their character.

And so on that note, thank you very much for your time, and again, I'd love to buy lunch for anyone who disagrees with me.