For many in the Sunshine State, Florida isn’t a particularly sunny place for many of its citizens as Governor DeSantis’ “war on woke” has aggressively implemented policies attacking LGBTQ+ rights, higher education, and black history, culture and studies
The climate of the state has become fertile ground for normalized bigotry the recent shooting of black residents at a Dollar General in Jacksonville and Neo-Nazi groups openly expressing their venom without any condemnation from the governor.
In the midst of this chaos, teachers are walking a delicate tightrope that they have never experienced previously regarding what they can and cannot teach. One of those teachers is 2004 Olympic Gold medalist Moushaumi Robinson.
After winning the 4x100m relay in Athens, Robinson became an educator and taught high school for the Orange County Public School System in Florida for over a decade and also became a yoga instructor.
Over the course of her teaching career, Robinson witnessed firsthand the racial inequities in the system and fought to rectify them along with providing the services to those students who needed it the most.
In 2017, she spoke at a school board meeting about the issue of suicides among students, which included one of her own students.
As a result, the school board implemented a five-year plan to include social-emotional learning into the curriculum.
After becoming a certified teacher for a gifted program that typically requires seven state tests to complete, she found out that Orange County only provided two. Teaching at a school with a 70% minority population, the tests were culturally biased toward the white male IQ.
She ultimately quit her role as a program-certified teacher and took action to address this issue.
“From third grade on they use the program to segregate the program,” she said. “The superintendent took a look into what was being talked about. When I sent an email and I spoke to it, the school board chair forwarded it to the chief of staff and checked to see how to expand the program.”
The school board program eventually provided the rest of the tests to secure federal funding.
During the Pandemic, Robinson discovered that many of her students didn’t have access to the laptops and hotspots needed for virtual learning from home. In yet another lengthy email to the district, she unabashedly addressed the idea of forcing kids back into school at the height of the pandemic when the death toll was rising and had a disproportionate effect on the black community.
“In the email, I spoke to the problem, that if they didn’t offer laptops or hotspots to all their students, you would be committing genocide given the high death rate of students,” she said.
Her email did the trick.
“They decided to take all the listeners or people who wanted to speak. Superintendent Barbara Jenkins was on her way to talk to me and said we got all the laptops and we are going to get those out. We are just waiting on the hotspots.”
It is that spirit of advocacy combined with her experience as an Olympian that led to additional opportunities to make an impact.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Robinson became an instrumental force behind the creation of the United States Olympic/Paralympic Committee (USOPC) Racial and Social Justice Council, a collection of current and former Olympians, scholars, and advocates aimed at advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion for Team USA.
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